War: What is it good for? (31 page)

Sometimes the firearms did get lost and the wagons did not stand; as late as 1739, Afghan horsemen overwhelmed the musketeers of Mughal
India, sacked Delhi, and carried off the Mughals' sapphire-studded Peacock Throne. But overall, between roughly 1550 and 1750 an astonishing thing happened. Armed with the new guns, the empires of the lucky latitudes finally mastered the steppes, breaking the cycle of productive and counterproductive wars.

The way the emperors did this was not by sending infantry to chase horsemen deep into the wilderness, which remained as expensive as ever, but by sending farmers to nibble away at the edges of the grasslands. Digging ditches, building palisades, and firing muskets, peasants channeled the nomads' movements and fenced the riders in, until eventually the nomads ran out of places to hide. Only then did emperors commit their new artillery, light enough to be dragged far onto the steppes.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley'd and thunder'd…

wrote the poet Tennyson of the most famous battle between horse and gun; but scenes much like the Light Brigade's ride to disaster at Balaclava were acted out countless times on the steppes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Storm'd at with shot and shell, into the mouth of hell rode the nomads. Few came back.

Russians and Ottomans pinched off the western end of the steppes between 1500 and 1650; in central Asia, Mughals and Persians pushed the Uzbeks and Afghans back between 1600 and 1700; and in the east, China swallowed up the endless wastes of Xinjiang between 1650 and 1750. By 1727, when Russian and Chinese officials met at Kiakhta to sign a treaty fixing their borders in Mongolia, the gunpowder empires had effectively shut down the steppe highway.

With the nomads removed from the equation, productive war quickly resumed. From Turkey to China, extraordinary empires flourished behind the safety of the closed steppe. With their central Asian flanks secured, the Ottomans conquered North Africa and advanced to the Danube. Russia absorbed Siberia, the Safavid dynasty created the biggest empire Persia had seen in a thousand years, the Mughals took over almost all of India, and the Qing dynasty pushed China's borders out beyond even those of the modern People's Republic.

The details varied enormously, but despite including more than their
fair share of drunks, drug addicts, and degenerates, the emperors were forced to follow the ancient script and turn into stationary bandits. They hired bureaucrats, paid their armies instead of leaving them to plunder, and—since shot and shell (not to mention harems and opium) cost money—found ways to promote farming and trade, the main sources of taxes. “Look with favor on the merchants,” a typical Ottoman official urged his sultan. “Always care for them; let no one harass them; for through their trading the land becomes prosperous.”

Most officials went on taking bribes and oppressing the poor, but a few began clarifying property rights, setting reasonable taxes, and encouraging investment. They promoted wonderful new crops—potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, squash, corn—from the Americas, which raised yields dramatically. By investing in roads and bridges, arresting bandits, and passing business-friendly laws, governments made it practical for farmers to grow cash crops such as cotton, coffee, and silk. By 1600, the Yangzi Delta probably had the world's most productive farmers, and those in southern India and Bengal might not have been far behind.

The new rules worked well for the sultans and shahs, who were able to build their Taj Mahals and mosques, but how much better-off all this governing left ordinary Asians is unclear. There are hints that wages rose as Leviathans expanded and fell as governments broke down, but much more study of the obscure and confusing sources scattered in archives from Istanbul to Beijing will be needed before we can say for sure.

We are on safer ground in asserting that governments reduced violence. In Persia, the worst case, tribal feuds paralyzed the country until the sixteenth century. “For years,” Shah Tahmasp lamented in 1524, “I was forced patiently to watch the bloodshed between the tribes and I tried to see what was the will of God in these events.” But seventy years later, Shah Abbas took a stronger line. “As soon as he came to the throne,” his biographer recorded, “he called for the principal highway robbers to be identified in each province and he then set about eliminating this class of people.” Abbas's hands-on approach to security (he personally beheaded one troublemaker in 1593) worked; in the 1670s a French traveler marveled that “the Roads are so safe all over Asia, especially in
Persia
.”

In China, we actually have some statistics. For the first half of its history, between 1368 and 1506, the Ming dynasty built up Leviathan, and just 108 episodes of banditry or rebellion are recorded from these years. Between 1507 and 1644, however, Ming bureaucrats steadily lost their grip, and the incident sheet balloons to 522 entries. Equally striking, bandits before 1506
tended to loot, rape, kill, and then run away before government forces showed up. After 1506 they tended to stand their ground against troops, and often won.

Eventually, in 1644, Ming rule collapsed altogether. But although millions—perhaps tens of millions—died in the subsequent Ming-Qing cataclysm (as historians call it), this horrific episode was different from earlier dynastic collapses. This time, the breakdown did not bring multiple waves of horsemen pouring out of the steppes to exploit the situation; China did not slide into recurring bloody crises. Instead, the new Qing dynasty restored the frontiers, crushed the rebels, and built an even stronger Leviathan.

To anyone living in 1650 or even 1700, it could easily have looked as if Asia had been the big winner since guns had been invented. Asians had given guns and oceangoing ships to Europe, but Europeans had repaid the gift with interest by improving the ships and then using them to carry equally improved guns back to Asia. Using European-style guns, Asians had then revived productive war, closing the steppes and building bigger, safer, and richer empires than ever before. In Europe, by contrast, not even the Ottoman Empire had managed to pull far enough ahead in the ever-accelerating arms race to conquer everyone else, and the continent remained a fragmented, squabbling mess of kings, princes, tsars, and even a few republics. Gazing in awe at the splendors of the East, no few Europeans concluded that they were falling further behind.

Drill, Baby, Drill

They were wrong. Far from falling behind, Europeans were in fact leaping ahead, and all by virtue of staying in place.

What I mean by this rather tortured formulation is that Europeans learned to line up soldiers and sailors and get them to stand their ground, which allowed them to get the most out of their firepower. By 1650, Europeans had discovered the fundamental principles behind pre-mechanical gunpowder warfare, and over the next 150 years they perfected them. Asian empires might have been reviving productive war, but Europeans were reinventing it, lock, stock, and smoking barrel.

As late as 1590, the biggest weakness of European armies and fleets was that their muskets and cannons were still so slow and inaccurate that, given luck and good timing, sudden onrushes of cavalry or pirates could overwhelm them before they could reload. The solution, legend has it, came to
Count William Louis of Nassau (co-commander of the Dutch army, fighting a grueling war for independence from Spain) in 1594, while he was reading an ancient Roman account of the best use of javelins.

William Louis dashed off a letter to his cousin Maurice (
Figure 4.6
). Competent musketeers, William Louis pointed out, can fire off a volley every thirty seconds or so. But what if, instead of all shooting at once, they formed up six ranks deep and fired one rank at a time, like Roman javelineers? The first rank could fire, turn on their heels, and march back through the other ranks. While they were countermarching, the second rank could fire; then, while it countermarched, the third fired; and so on. By the time the sixth rank had fired and countermarched, the first would be ready to fire again. Instead of one big volley every thirty seconds, the musketeers now fired one small volley every five seconds—close enough to a continuous hail of musket balls to stop cavalry or pirates in their tracks.

This, it turned out, was harder to do in practice—against enemies who shot back—than it sounded in theory, but in the 1620s Swedish soldiers
finally got volleying to work the way William Louis said it should. Sweden's king Gustavus Adolphus made the breakthrough by turning the Dutch ideas on their heads. Instead of having his men shoot, then countermarch, Gustavus had them march ten paces forward, then shoot, and then stay where they were to reload. Next, as a Scottish officer in Gustavus's army explained it, the other “rancks advance before them and give fire after the same manner, till the whole troop hath discharged and so to beginne againe as before … ever advancing to an enemie, never turning backe without death, or victorie.”

Gustavus also saw that getting the best out of volleying infantry required reorganizing the rest of the army too. Field artillery should now be used in mass, with mobile batteries beefing up the infantry's hail of musket balls. Cavalry, however, should give up the gun. Sixteenth-century horsemen had typically ridden up to enemy infantry with a pistol in each hand, fired at close range, then galloped away, but continuous musketry made this suicidal. Gustavus returned riders to the age of cold steel, keeping his cavalry well away from infantry until a careless enemy left a flank open or a demoralized regiment turned and ran. Then the horsemen would charge home with slashing sabers.

To do all these tasks well, Gustavus realized, armies also needed to be a lot bigger. At Agincourt in 1415 the French probably fielded about 30,000 men, but as Gustavus's reforms spread across Europe, numbers exploded. In the 1640s, major powers were raising 150,000 men (about half the size of the Roman army in Agricola's day). France mustered 200,000 troops in the 1670s, 273,000 in 1691, and 395,000 in 1696. Between 1701 and 1713 a further 650,000 Frenchmen joined up, swelling the ranks until France had more soldiers than priests.

While Europe's generals worked out how to maximize firepower on land, its admirals solved the same problem at sea. There the goal was to get the most out of broadsides. Sixteenth-century fleets had tended to sail straight at the enemy, but because galleons carried nearly all their guns along their sides, there was very little shooting until the two fleets fell upon each other. Then the battle degenerated into a confused melee, in which gunners, blinded by smoke, were as likely to hit friendly ships as foes.

Between the 1630s and the 1650s, Dutch admirals came up with the line-ahead formation, a maritime version of volleying. Instead of charging straight at the enemy, ships now formed a nose-to-tail line and sailed parallel to their opponents, pouring out broadsides. The English, French, and Spanish, of course, quickly learned to do the same. Two fleets might sail
alongside each other for hours, blasting away until night fell or one admiral broke off; or, if a gap opened in the enemy line, a fleet might sail through it, raking the vulnerable bow and stern of the ships on either side with broadside after broadside.

Admirals redesigned their fleets around this principle. Ships of the line (that is, those tough enough to be pounded in line-ahead formation) became a navy's backbone, while smaller ships screened the line, scouted, or—at least until about 1700—were used as fireships, deliberately set alight and pushed into the enemy line to cause chaos.

On land and sea, the key to these linear tactics was standardization. Already in 1599, Dutch quartermasters were giving every soldier the same kind of musket so they would take the same time to reload. Gustavus whittled the smorgasbord of sixteenth-century cannons down to just three types, throwing balls of three, twelve, or twenty-four pounds. And by adopting “seventy-fours,” a French design with seventy-four cannons spread over two or three decks, admirals gained confidence that each vessel would respond to subtly shifting breezes in just the same way and keep its place in line.

Predictably, the hardest part of the war machine to standardize was the men. According to a Dutch manual of 1607, volleying involved forty-three separate steps, which musketeers had to memorize and perform perfectly under fire. Cannons had their own complicated routines, and keeping ships close-hauled in line-ahead formation was hardest of all. Thousands of able seamen had to scramble up rigging and reef, furl, tack, luff, reach, and beat at exactly the right moment—all while shrouded in smoke and peppered with shot. Men had to be made into interchangeable parts.

Four centuries on from this military revolution, delegates at the 2008 Republican National Convention came up with a catchy slogan to sum up their response to steeply rising gasoline prices. “Drill, baby, drill,” they chanted, urging America to pump more oil from its own territories. No catchphrase could better describe the method that Gustavus Adolphus and his contemporaries came up with for standardizing men. Drill was the way to make them interchangeable. Relentless martinets (so called after Jean Martinet, a notoriously exacting French drillmaster) drilled soldiers in ramming powder, wadding, and musket balls down their muzzleloaders till they could do it blindfolded, and sailors practiced tying knots till their fingers were raw. Men have never yet been turned completely into cogs in a machine, but seventeenth-century drillmasters came remarkably close.