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 fanaticism, and it is true that his tactics were those of George S. Patton: Always attack! But it was not attack based on madness; rather, the Swedish attack was based on rigid training and iron discipline, on total dedication and belief in victory, and on excellent battlefield communications. Informed by drums and messengers, subordinate commanders always knew what was expected of them. Any weakness in their own army was quickly covered; any weakness in the enemy's ranks was rapidly exploited.
Charles was willing to break the seasonal tradition of warfare— the hard frozen ground was easier for his wagons and cannon, and perhaps his troops were more used to the freezing weather—and was ready to campaign in winter. Obviously, in a war of movement the army with the greater mobility had the advantage. Campaigns were as often decided by transportation and logistics as by pitched battles. Thus, anything which improved mobility was important; the French were enormously pleased by the development of a new portable baking oven which could be set up, fired and produce fresh bread within hours.
Although field commanders were always wary when an enemy army was nearby, few battles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fought unless both sides were willing to fight. It was difficult to find suitable terrain and to arrange the necessary elaborate array of men, horses and guns. A commander reluctant to fight could usually avoid battle by remaining in rough, scrubby, broken ground. Should one general begin the hours of preparation necessary to ready his lines for battle, the other, if unwilling, could march away. Thus, two armies could exist in reasonable proximity for days without a major engagement.
When both commanders had compelling reasons to fight—to contest a river crossing or a strong position on a main road—the armies wheeled into position 300 to 600 yards apart. If there was time, the army which expected to be on the defensive—usually the Russians when confronted by Charles XII or the French when faced by Marlborough—erected barriers of sharpened stakes called chevaux de frise planted in the ground before the infantry lines to give some protection against advancing enemy cavalry. At points along the line, artillery officers sited their guns, ready to fire cannonballs weighing three, six, eight pounds or even sixteen and twenty-four pounds for the heaviest guns, 450 to 600 yards into the enemy ranks. A set-piece battle usually began with an artillery bombardment; a long pounding could be damaging, but was rarely decisive against experienced and disciplined troops. To an astonishing degree, the men simply stood waiting in ranks while cannonballs whistled through the air or bounded along the ground, tearing bloody lanes through their lines.
The greatest advances in field artillery during the seventeenth century had been made by Sweden. Gustavus Adolphus had standarized field-artillery calibers so each gun would not need its own supply of balls and, in the heat of battle, the same ammunition could feed any gun. Then, as artillery became almost an end in itself, Swedish generals realized that artillerymen often were forgetting the need to support their own infantry. To compensate, they attached light cannon directly to the infantry battalions, two guns per battalion, which could give close support by firing directly at the enemy infantry opposing that battalion. Later, Swedish artillery was attached even to cavalry. This highly mobile horse artillery could unharness, fire into enemy cavalry formations and be away in a matter of minutes.
The decisive arm, however, was not the artillery or the cavalry but the infantry, and the great battles of the age were won by infantry battalions advancing or standing in line, fighting each other with muskets, flintlocks, pikes and, later, bayonets. The seventeenth century had been a time of rapid transition in infantry equipment and tactics. For centuries, the ancient pike—a heavy steel-tipped lance fourteen to sixteen feet long—had been the all-conquering "Queen of Battles." Rows of pikemen, their long lances extended, advanced on each other, and the thrust of a wall of pikes brought the decision. But the development of firearms gradually made this famous weapon obsolete. When pikemen faced a line of musketeers, the musketeers could stand at a distance and fire musket balls into their ranks, dropping them one by one. By the end of the century, only a few pikemen still appeared on the battlefield, assigned exclusively to defending the musketeers from hostile cavalry. It still was a fearsome thing for a horseman to ride into a wall of long, sharp pikes, but when the pikeman was not under immediate attack at close qaurters, there was no one more useless or less dangerous on the battlefield. He simply stood in ranks, holding his long pike, being battered by enemy artillery and killed by enemy musket balls, while waiting for someone to approach and impale himself on his pike.