Actual bayonet combat is extremely rare in military history. General Trochu saw only one bayonet fight in a lifetime of soldiering with the French army in the nineteenth century, and that was when French units collided by accident with a Russian regiment in the heavy fog of the Crimean War’s Battle of Inkerman in 1854. And in these rare bayonet engagements actual bayonet wounds were even rarer yet.
When this uncommon event does occur, and one bayonet-armed man stands face-to-face with another, what happens most commonly is anything but a thrust with the bayonet. Just as Roman legionnaires had to fight the tendency to slash with their swords rather than thrust, so too do modern soldiers tend to use their weapons in a manner that will not necessitate thrusting into their enemy’s bodies.
Holmes says that despite all the bayonet training soldiers receive, “in combat they very often reversed their weapons and used them as clubs…. The Germans seem to have a positive penchant for using the butt rather than the bayonet…. In close-in fighting the Germans preferred clubs, coshes, and sharpened spades.” Note that all of these are bludgeoning or hacking weapons.
He goes on to give a superb example of the subtle and unconscious nature of this resistance to bayoneting: “Prince Frederick Charles asked a [World War I] German infantryman why he did this. ‘I don’t know,’ replied the soldier. ‘When you get your dander up the thing turns round in your hand of itself.’”
Numerous accounts of American Civil War battles indicate the same resistance to use of the bayonet on the part of the vast majority of soldiers on both sides. In melees both Yank and Reb preferred to use the butt of the weapon, or to swing their muskets by the barrel like a club, rather than gut the enemy with their bayonets. Some writers have concluded that a specific characteristic of this brother-against-brother civil war must have been the cause of the soldier’s reluctance to bayonet his enemy, but wound statistics from nearly two centuries of battles indicate that what is revealed here is a basic, profound, and universal insight into human nature. First, the closer the soldier draws to his enemy the harder it is to kill him, until at bayonet range it becomes extremely difficult, and, second, the average human being has a strong resistance to piercing the body of another of his own kind with a handheld edged weapon, preferring to club or slash at the enemy.
Since personal kills with a bayonet are so extraordinarily rare on the battlefield, it is much to Richard Holmes’s credit that his lifetime of study in this field has gleaned the following personal narratives from individuals who contributed to this “fraction of one per cent of all wounds inflicted” in modern war.
In one such narrative, a lance corporal in the German infantry in 1915 describes a bayonet kill:
We got the order to storm a French position, strongly held by the enemy, and during the ensuing melee a French corporal suddenly stood before me, both our bayonets at the ready, he to kill me, I to kill him. Saber duels in Freiburg had taught me to be quicker than he and pushing his weapon aside I stabbed him through the chest. He dropped his rifle and fell, and the blood shot out of his mouth. I stood over him for a few seconds and then I gave him the coup de grace. After we had taken the enemy position, I felt giddy, my knees shook, and I was actually sick.
He goes on to state that this bayoneted Frenchman, apparently above all other incidents in combat, haunted his dreams for many nights thereafter. Indeed, the “intimate brutality” of bayonet killing gives every indication of being a circumstance with tremendous potential for psychological trauma.
An Australian soldier in World War I, writing in a letter to his father, puts a distinctly different light on bayoneting Germans:
Strike me pink the square heads are dead mongrels. They will keep firing until you are two yds. off them & then drop their rifles & ask for mercy. They get it too right where the chicken gets the axe…. I… will fix a few more before I have finished. Its good sport father when the bayonet goes in there eyes bulge out like prawns. [Sic]
If we can believe what is said here, and if both the killing and the lack of remorse were not just idle bragging to his father, then this soldier represents one of those rare soldiers who have the internal makeup to participate in such an act. Later in this book we will address predisposition as a factor in killing, with particular emphasis on the 2 percent who are predisposed toward what has been termed “aggressive psychopathic” tendencies. And in the section “Killing and Atrocities” we will more closely consider the process in which soldiers who fight at close range and attempt to surrender stand a good chance of being killed on the spot by the soldiers they had most recently been trying to kill. The objective here is to gain insight into the nature of killing with edged weapons, and into the nature of those who are able to kill in this manner. And from what we can observe, it must be a rare and unusual individual who can find such activity to be “good sport.”
Another Australian, a World War I veteran of the first Battle of Gaza, who apparently did not participate in any bayonet kills, described bayonet fighting as “just berserk slaughter… the grunting breaths, the gritting teeth and the staring eyes of the lunging Turk, the sobbing scream as the bayonet ripped home.” Here we see combat at its most personal. When a man bayonets a person who is facing him, the “sobbing scream,” the blood shooting out of his mouth, and his eyes bulging out “like prawns” are all part of the memory the killer must carry forever. This is killing with edged weapons, and it is no wonder that it is so extraordinarily rare in modern warfare.
We can understand then that the average soldier has an intense resistance toward bayoneting his fellow man, and that this act is surpassed only by the resistance to
Soldiers who would bravely face a hail of bullets will consistently flee before a determined individual with cold steel in his hands. Du Picq noted, “Each nation in Europe says: ‘No one stands his ground before a bayonet charge made by us.’ And all are right.” A human wave of cold steel — be it pikes, spears, or bayonets — coming at one’s position would be cause for understandable concern on anyone’s part, and as Holmes puts it “one side or the other usually recalls an urgent appointment elsewhere before bayonets cross.” Very often neither side can bring itself to close with the enemy’s bayonets, the advance falters, and the two parties begin to fire at one another from ridiculously short ranges.
World War II veteran Fred Majdalany wrote that there was
a lot of loose talk about the use of the bayonet. But relatively few soldiers could truthfully say that they had stuck a bayonet into a German. It is the threat of the bayonet and the sight of the point that usually does the work. The man almost invariably surrenders
In the modern bayonet charge one side or the other usually breaks and runs before they meet, and then the psychological balance tips significantly. But this does not mean that bayonets and bayonet charges are ineffective. As Paddy Griffith points out:
A great deal of misunderstanding has arisen from the fact that a “bayonet charge” could be highly effective even without any bayonet actually touching an enemy soldier, let alone killing him. One hundred per cent of the casualties might be caused by musketry, yet the bayonet could still be the instrument of victory. This was because its purpose was not to kill soldiers but to disorganize regiments and win ground. It was the flourish of the bayonet and the determination in the eyes of its owner that on some occasions produced shock.
Units with a history and tradition of close-combat, hand-to-hand killing inspire special dread and fear in an enemy by capitalizing upon this natural aversion to the “hate” manifested in this determination to engage in close-
