new army of 220,000.
Although, as wars dragged on, conscription became necessary to fill the ranks, most armies in this period were made up of professional soldiers. Many of these, both officers and men, were foreign mercenaries—in that time, a soldier could join any army he liked as long as he did not fight against his own king. Frequently, kings and princes who were at peace rented out whole regiments to warring neighbors. Thus, Swiss, Scots and Irish regiments served in the French army; Danish and Prussian regiments in the Dutch army; and the Hapsburg Imperial army contained men from all the German states. Individual officers changed sides as often as modern executives change jobs, nor did their past or future employers bear them ill-will for their actions. As a twenty-four-year-old colonel, Marlborough served under Marshal Turenne against the Dutch and was personally praised at a great parade by Louis XIV himself. Later, in command of a predominantly Dutch army, Marlborough almost toppled the Sun King from his throne. For a while, both before and after Peter came to the throne, most of the senior officers in the Russian army were foreigners; without them, the Tsar could have fielded little more than a mob.
Customarily, these professional soldiers conducted warfare by accepted rules. There was a seasonal rhythm to war which was rarely broken: summer and autumn were for campaigning and battles; winter and spring were for rest, recruiting and replenishment. In the main, these rules were dictated by the weather, the crops and the state of the roads. Every year, the armies waited until the spring thaw had melted the snows and enough fresh green grass had sprouted to nourish the horses of the cavalry and baggage trains. In May and June, once the mud had dried to dust, long columns of men and wagons began to move. The generals had until October to maneuver, besiege and offer battle; by November, when the first frost appeared, the armies began going into winter quarters. These rules were almost religiously observed in Western Europe. Through ten consecutive years of campaigning on the continent, Marlborough regularly left the army in November and returned to London until spring. In the same months, senior French officers returned to Paris or Versailles. A long-vanished aspect of those civilized wars was the issuance of passports to prominent officers to travel through hostile territory on the shortest routes for winter leave. Common soldiers, of course, did not enjoy these priviliges. There was no question of home leave for them until the war was over. If they were fortunate, they were confined to billets in town through the coldest months. All too often, however, they were crowded into winter encampments of huts and hovels, prey to frostbite, disease and hunger. In the spring, the gaps chewed through their ranks by pestilence would be filled by fresh consignments of recruits.
On the march, an army of .this period moved slowly, even when its passage was unopposed; few armies could move faster than ten miles a day, while the average daily march was five. Marlborough's historic march from the Low Countries up the Rhine to Bavaria before the Battle of Blenheim was considered a 'lightning stroke' at the time—250 miles in five weeks. The limiting factor usually was the artillery. The horses struggling to pull the cumbersome, heavy cannon, whose wheels fearsomely rutted the roads for those that followed, simply could not move faster.
Armies marched in long columns, battalion after battalion, a screen of cavalry riding in front and on the flanks, the carts, carriages and gun caissons trundling along in the rear. Normally, an army marched at sunrise and camped in mid-afternoon. Making a new camp every night required almost as much effort as the day's march. Tents were erected in lines, baggage unpacked, cooking fires lit, water provided for men and animals, and the horses set to grazing. If the enemy was nearby, each camp had to be placed on suitable ground and prepared with temporary earthworks and wooden palisades as a potential strongpoint able to resist attack. Then, after an exhausted sleep, the men were roused, and in the pre-dawn darkness all this had to be dismantled and packed into wagons for the next day's march.
Not everything, of course, could be carried in wagons. An army of 50,000 to 100,000 men could maintain itself only by marching through fertile countryside which could supply many of its wants, or by having additional supplies brought to it by water. In Western Europe, the great rivers were the railways of war. In Russia, where the rivers flow north and south and the war between Russia and Sweden was east-west, rivers were of little value, and the consequent dependence on wagon trains and local foraging was far greater.
In Western Europe, most campaigns proceeded in a leisurely manner. Sieges were popular and much preferred to the greater risks and nasty surprises of open-field battle. Siege warfare was conducted with exquisite, almost mathematical precision; on each side, at any given moment the commander knew exactly where matters stood and what was going to happen next. Louis XIV was devoted to siege warfare; there was no risk of losing the great army which he had so carefully and expensively built. Also, it enabled him to participate safely in the Game of Mars. Besides, in Louis de Vauban, the Sun King possessed the greatest master of fortification and siege operations in the history of warfare. On behalf of his master, Vauban personally laid siege to fifty towns without failure, and his own fortresses were the models for the age. Sometimes purely military bastions, sometimes large fortified towns or cities, they covered and protected the frontiers of France like an interlocking web. Carefully adapted to the particular terrain, each was a work not only of supreme utility but also of art. They tended to be shaped like a gigantic star, with each rampart built so as to be protected by flanking enfilade fire from cannon or at least musketry at right angles. Each salient was a self-contained fort, with its own artillery and garrison, its own sally ports for sudden sorties by the defenders. Around these great stone ramparts ran a tracery of ditches, twenty feet deep and forty feet wide, also faced with stone—bleak and desolate places for attacking infantry to find itself. When they were built, France's armies were on the offensive, and these fortresses, their great doors decorated with gilt fleur-de-lis and opening onto buildings of severe splendor, were intended not as static defense points but as pivots on which French armies could maneuver. Later, as Marlborough's armies were battering their way toward Paris and Versailles, Vauban's fortresses saved the Sun King his throne.
Louis himself paid credit to his servant: 'A town defended by
Vauban is a town impregnable; a town besieged by Vauban is a town taken.'* Under Vauban's direction, sieges became formal theatrical spectacles, immaculately staged and timed. Once the fortress was surrounded, Vauban began a series of trenches which zigzagged ever nearer to the fortress walls. Calculating the angles with mathematical precision, Vauban placed the trenches so that defending fire from the fortress walls could scarcely touch the infantry in the trenches digging their way ever closer. Meanwhile, the besieger's artillery fired day and night at the ramparts, silencing defending cannon, smashing holes in the parapets. When the moment of assault came, the attacking infantry stormed out of the trenches and across the ditches (which they had filled with portable fascines of tightly bound brush) and through the breaches in the pulverized walls. Few sieges, however, reached this climax. In the rigorous etiquette which governed both sides, once the defender knew that it was mathematically certain that his fortress would fall, he was free to surrender with honor; neither his own government nor the besieger expected anything less. But if, in a burst of unreasoning passion, the defender refused to surrender and the assailant was forced to go to the expense in time and lives of taking the city by storm, then, once taken, the entire city was given up to rape, sack and flames.
Although Vauban's art has never been excelled, then, as now, the greatest commanders of the era— Marlborough, Charles XII, Prince Eugene—were practitioners of the war movement. Of these, the greatest unquestionably was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who commanded the armies of Europe against Louis XIV from 1701 to 1711 and who never fought a battle he did not win or besieged a fortress he did not take. In ten years of war, fighting against one marshal of France after another, he defeated them all, and when political change in England cost him his command, he was driving relentlessly through Vauban's great fortress barrier toward Versailles itself. Marlborough was not interested in the conventional, limited warfare of the time; it was not a single town or fortress that he sought. His belief was in decisive, major action, even at great risk. His objectives were the annihilation of the French army and the humbling of the Sun King in a great open-field battle. He was ready to stake a province, a campaign, a war, even a kingdom, on the outcome of a single afternoon. Marlborough was the most successful all-around soldier of the age. He acted simultaneously as field commander, allied commander-in-chief and England's foreign minister and
*Although when the King himself was present at a siege, the credit had to be shared. As Louis put it: 'Monsieur de Vauban proposed to me the steps which I thought best.'
virtual prime minister. In terms of our own most recent major war, it was as if he combined the functions and duties of Churchill, Eden, Eisenhower and Montgomery.
But Marlborough's command always had a certain balance, a blend of grand strategy and tactical purpose. The most daring and aggressive soldier of the age was Charles XII of Sweden. Charles, it seemed to his enemies and to a watching Europe, was anxious for battle, at any time and at any odds. He was utterly devoted to rapid movement and shock tactics. His impetuosity and eagerness to attack have brought the charge of rashness, even of
