All of the preceding refers to armor that was worn like clothing. But for most of the same period, the most effective piece of armor was not worn but carried: the shield. At close range, the arrow from a longbow will penetrate a breast plate of the type worn in the 15th century. It may not pass all the way through, but if only half of it got through, half of a 28-inch arrow is more than enough to kill the man wearing the breastplate. If the arrow hits a shield and has the same effect, it might not even reach the body of the shield-holder. Even if it did, after passing through the shield, it wouldn’t have enough power to penetrate any kind of armor.
The shield was so important in classical Greece that the heavy infantryman, the hoplite, took his name from the word for shield, hoplon. For a hoplite to lose his shield was the ultimate disgrace. European knights carried shields until plate armor was developed so heavy it could resist a lance thrust by itself. The Saxon “shield wall” at Hastings turned back the Norman knights for most of the day. Archers and crossbowmen could not hang shields on their arms for obvious reasons, but they had substitutes. Some crossbowmen carried large shields on their backs. When loading their weapons, they turned their backs to the enemy. That was a less than satisfactory alternative, because a shield on the back was too close to the body. A better substitute was the pavises, a large shield propped up on the ground. Both archers and crossbowmen used pavises.
Shields were such such effective pieces of equipment that they were the only armor that has been used by many nations. The Highlanders of Scotland, the Zulus of South Africa, and the Plains Indians of North America, as well as hundreds of peoples between them, used no armor but the shield. The Spanish infantry swordsmen of the 16th century had shields that were proof against pistol shots.
From the late Middle Ages into the early modern period, a type of shield was frequently worn by civilians. In an era when every male with pretensions to manhood wore a sword, the more aggressive types hung small round shields on the hilts of their swords. This type of shield, called a buckler, was held in the left hand of a right-handed swordsman and used to parry an opponent’s sword strokes. People wearing a buckler on their swords were presumed to be looking for a fight and called “swashbucklers.”
Armor did not entirely disappear with the advent of gunpowder. Some French cavalrymen were still wearing breastplate and metal helmets in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and British horsemen of the same period and later wore mail epaulets. In the American Civil War, many soldiers privately purchased “bullet-proof” steel vests to wear under their uniforms. Some of these actually worked. In the 1880s, Wyatt Earp wore one and it was said to have saved his life on at least one occasion.
World War I saw a revival of officially issued armor. The most widespread item was the steel helmet, which was designed to protect soldiers in the trenches from overhead shrapnel bursts. The Germans issued special armor to many of their machine gunners and some snipers. It consisted of a steel corselet and a helmet that covered the entire head except the eyes.
In World War II, the crews of bombers often wore “flak vests” as protection from the fragments of bursting anti-aircraft shells. Infantry were given armor vests made of nylon in the later stages of the Korean War. These vests would stop shell fragments and bullets from a .45 caliber pistol, but not bullets from any service rifle. They continued to be used in the Vietnam War. Body armor has continued to improve. In the Iraq War, combat soldiers have helmets of Kevlar, a synthetic material that is lighter and stronger than steel, and armor vests of the same material. The Kevlar “soft armor” vests have pockets that contain “hard armor” plates of metal, ceramic, or plastic, which can resist penetration by most rifle bullets. The most generally-used forms of the new armor will stop bullets from the 7.62 × 39 caliber Kalashnikov rifles. Some troops, particularly those on riot control, wear Kevlar greaves.
The modern infantryman is as thoroughly armored as a 17th-century pikeman.
Chapter 6
Horses Change the Battlefield: The Chariot
An army of enemies was approaching Egypt and they were coming from the northeast, not the south, the only direction from which enemies had come before. Nubians had occasionally marched north, along the Great River, but no large armies had ever come from either the east or the west. The barren, water-less deserts that stretched on either side of the Nile Valley had a way of discouraging invaders. The Pharaoh called up all the men of Lower Egypt to meet the invaders. They appeared with their copper axes, copper-headed spears, stone maces, and simple self-bows.
Egyptian weaponry was nowhere near as advanced as that of the people of Mesopotamia, where warfare was almost constant. The deserts had protected the Egyptians from all but occasional clashes with the Nubians, the black inhabitants of the much-less-populous kingdom on the Upper Nile. And if the Egyptians’ military equipment and organization was primitive compared to that of the peoples in the valley of the Two Rivers, it was light-years behind what they faced now.
The enemy, called the Hyksos, which has been variously translated as “Lords of the Uplands” or “Shepherd Kings,” had sharp bronze weapons, including swords, bronze scale armor, and powerful composite bows. (See Chapter 2.) They also had something utterly unknown to the Egyptians: horse-drawn chariots.
Egyptian tradition says the Hyksos took Lower Egypt without a fight. That doesn’t mean they slowly infiltrated. Archaeological evidence shows that they suddenly took possession of the Delta and all of Lower Egypt after thoroughly sacking it. “Without a fight” means that there was no toe-to-toe infantry slugging match — what the Egyptians meant by “fight.”
On their light, fast chariots, the Hyksos literally rode circles around their enemies and shot them down. There were two men to a chariot: a driver and an archer. The Hyksos powerful composite bow easily outranged the bows of the Egyptians. The mobile Hyksos could concentrate on any part of the Egyptian line they chose and shoot down the unarmored Egyptian infantry with impu-nity. When at last the Egyptians broke and fled, the Hyksos charioteers rode them down, shooting arrows and slashing with their curved bronze swords. They stayed in the Delta and Lower Egypt for a century. They didn’t try to conquer Upper Egypt, where the valley is narrow — not ideal chariot country — and most transportation was by boat.
Staying proved to be a mistake. The southern Egyptians learned to make composite bows and bronze weapons and armor. Most important, they learned to make and use chariots. They drove the Hyksos out of Egypt and ended Egypt’s centuries-old isolation. The Egyptians became conquerors and pursued the Hyksos into their homeland.
The Hyksos homeland is believed to be the Arabian Desert, south and east of the cities of Syria. Not much is known about the Hyksos. Some of their rulers had Semitic names like Jacob-her; others had names that cannot be identified ethnically. Their invasion, in about 1750 B.C., was at the southwestern end of a human avalanche that began on the steppes of what is now southern Russia and was sparked by the invention of the light, horse-drawn chariot.
A chariot of sorts had been around for centuries, not in Egypt but in Mesopotamia, in the lands of Sumer and Akkad. The first was a clumsy vehicle with four solid-disk wheels. It was pulled by two donkeys, because no horses had been domesticated. It had high sides and the front of it was almost as high as its occupants’ heads. There were two occupants, a driver and a man who threw javelins at enemy troops. There was a supply of javelins in a quiver hung on the side of the chariot. It was obviously heavy, and the four wheels on fixed axles made turning it extremely difficult. Later Sumerian chariots had only two wheels, but they were still heavy and though these donkey-powered war machines must have been slow, nevertheless they proved to be valuable in the many wars between the city-states of Mesopotamia. The high sides protected the warriors in the chariots, and they were faster than infantry, especially infantry formed into a stiff, massive phalanx.