Editor's Note: we are extreme fortunate SYWA member Brent Nosworthy allowed us to reprint portions of his book, With Musket, Cannon and Sword, within the pages of our Journal.

His book analyses Napoleonic battle tactics, significant portions of the book focuses on tactics from the mid Eighteenth Century. I strongly encourage anyone with an interest in SYW tactics to read this book, as well as Brent's companion book Anatomy of Victory: Battle Tactics 1689-1763. Having done so, you will certainly have solid understanding of how the soldiers and the armies fought during the Eighteenth Century.

The Quick Fire Philosophy

Three mid-eighteenth century innovations would ultimately have a profound effect on the way infantry attacked its enemy or defended itself on the battlefield:

• The increased availability of gunpowder, allowing each soldier to be supplied with many more cartidges
• The adoption of cadenced marching
• And the introduction of a cadenced manual of arms, the last two made possible by regular drilling and instruction demanded by Frederick William of Prussia.

Frederick William required his infantry to untiringly practise loading and firing their muskets, a procedure known in the military as the 'manual of arms'. Through this seemingly endless rehearsal, Frederick William and Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau were able to effect a most important innovation: each step of the manual of arms was cadenced, in other words, everyone performed each step at exactly the same moment. It was this ability, rather than simply performing the loading procedure more quickly, that made Prussian infantry firepower appear so awesome. However, this capability as it applied to offensive doctrine was largely ignored by his son, Frederick the Great, for almost the first two decades of his reign.

When Frederick first went to war in 1740, following the example of Charles XII of Sweden, he required his infantry whenever possible to assume the offensive and quickly advance towards the enemy without stopping to fire. In adopting these tactics, Frederick placed himself squarely in the French/Spanish tactical school and clearly broke from his father's predilection for the Dutch method of attack which called for the advancing lines to periodically stop and execute well delivered volleys to attempt to break the enemy's will to continue to stand and resist.

However, as Frederick's enemies learned from the Prussian example and improved the discipline and training in their own armies, these aggressive tactics proved less and less successful. As a result, within several years of the opening of the Seven Years War, Frederick was forced to concede that when attacking an enemy prepared to fight, it was usually necessary first to soften the defending line by stopping and administering several well delivered volleys.

The feasibility of Frederick's quick fire methods were based partly on the Prussian adoption of rigorous infantry training and the cadenced manual of arms. They were also indebted to the increased availablility of gunpowder around the mid-eighteenth century. Prior to this, ammunition had been very much more restricted and the average infantry was sent into battle with less than 25 cartidges. This was significantly less than the 50 to 60 cartridges carried by soldiers during the Seven Years War.

Gunpowder Quality

The quality of gunpowder that existed in the early eighteenth century was considerably poorer than that which would become available fifty years later. This meant a musket would invariably become fouled after about thirty discharges, and this was one of the reasons limiting the supply during the early period. Better quality gunpowder also meant that infantry could fire more shots and hence more cartidges were distributed.

One of the reasons usually attibuted to the success of the Prussian infantry was ability to 'outshoot' the opposing infantry, or more accurately, to give the impression that it was outshooting its opponents. Once again, the legacy of Frederick William's training came to the fore, and the Prussian infantry was able to deliver relatively ordered volleys much more quicly than its counterpart in other western European armies. The Austrians and other German states were the first to emulate the Prussian example; they were quickly followed by the British. This new tactic of firing as quickly as possible was known inthe English-speaking world as 'quick fire'.

In this case the infantry would dispense with ramming the charge properly down the barrel or even ramming it at all. Instead. the soldier would bang the butt of his musket repeatedly on the ground to shake the cartridge suffciently down the barrel. To facilitate this, the man would enlarge the diameter of the vent leading into the barrel near the priming pan. This allowed some of the powder to fall into this pan, and thus simultaneously charged and primed the piece. Though it was obvious that this practive reduced the effectiveness of the charge and caused frequent 'flare backs', it also reduced the amount of time needed to reload, and thus sped up the rate of fire.

Implications of the Quick Fire System

Editor: Nosworthy continues his discussion of quick fire by pointing out that it did not initially change the manner in which various nationalities delivered their musket fire. The British continued to use platoon fire while the French espoused volley by ranks; however, subtle differences in old and new methods began to emerge.

Prior to 1740, the volley mechanism was orchestrated so that the colonel remained completely in control of the fire, which on purpose was to be quite sparse. In other words, the troops would be ordered to stop, a portion of the men typically would deliver a single volley and then recommence their advance. There was no emphasis on the speed at which the volleys were delivered, and engaging in a prolonged fire fight was eschewed. The colonel actually gave each 'division', which for firing purposes was about one-third of the battalion, the order to fire. In this earlier version of platoon firing, the next division to fire was not ordered to fire immediately after the preceding division, but had to await the colonel's command. Every step in the process was designed to allow the colonel to retain control over each action in the firing procedure.

The advent of the Prussian 'quick fire' quickly changed all this. The emphasis on speed meant that the divisions were now required to deliver fire as quickly as possible in succession. To accomplish this staccato-like effect, the colonel no longer controlled exactly when each division was to fire, and the authority to designate the exact moment to fire was transferred to the officer commanding the division.

This transformation in the way platoon fire was executed had two profound effects. The first was intentional: a dramatic increase in the rate of fire, believed to inflict proportionately higher casualties among the enemy. The second effect: by reducing the time separating the individual firings and pressuring the men to reload and present their arms as quickly as possible, the 'coefficient of confusion' among the ranks was also dramatically increased.

In the earlier system, where each firing was ordered to fire once before moving, there had been a noticeable pause before the next delivered its fire. Consequently, it was much easier to control the men. Someone firing out of turn would stand out and be subjected to immediate discipline and the fire, therefore, remained controlled.

With the emphasis on quick fire, where each firing could discharge as little as four or five seconds after its predecessor (three firings each attempting to fire four or five times a minute), after several volleys, the formal groupings would start to blur. A division or platoon might begin to fire a second or two early, and a sense of continuous fire would arise. The men, reloading as fast as they could would each start to fire as soon as they were ready and the officers would lose control. The fire, which had started off as regular volleys, would soon devolve into disorganized and uncontrolled individual fire. When this happened, the officers were no longer able readily to stop the firing and resume the advance, and the firefight devolved into a prolonged affair.

Despite these shortcomings,the frequent success of the Prussians during the Seven Years War added credibility to the Prussians' advocacy of the quick fire doctrine. Authorities in other western European armies began increasingly to cite this as a reason for the ascendancy of the Prussian infantry over their enemies. The infantry in other German states, and then the British, followed the Prussian lead with many of its officers experimenting with quick fire techniques.... Of course in those armies such as the French where the a prest doctrine was employed on the offensive, quick fire doctrine was relegated to defensive applications.

Rate of Fire

Editor: Nosworthy then goes into a discussion about various tests condueted by William Muller (in British service) and Duane, both in the early 1800's, to determine the theoretical maximum rate of fire under ideal conditions. The following section is my brief paraphrase of Nosworthy's commentary.

The Prussians claimed that their trained infantry could fire five rounds per minute, and this was generally accepted by military men up through Napoleon's time. Various tests were conducted to determine how many firings an experienced soldier could deliver within a predetermined length of time. Nosworthy cites one particularly extensive test in which trained men fired a total of 36 rounds in 13 minutes.

The conclusions reached were thus: a veteran soldier might deliver 5 rounds during the first minute, but over time, his average would diminish to about 3 rounds per minute. This rate of fire could be maintained for approximately eight minutes, afterwhich the musket barrel became too hot to hold and load using a cadenced manual of arms. Duane's conclusion was that while it was not uncommon for firefights to last for an extended period of time, the rate of fire must certainly have been lower than in the theoretical tests. We now return to Nosworthy's commentary.

Firing By Files

That the new emphasis on volume of fire led to a more frequent breakdown of orderly volleys did not go unnoticed. Many sought a means of addressing this problem without rejecting the new emphasis on a higher rate of fire that underlay this tendency in the first place. In France, where, as in the remainder of Europe, the infantry continued to deploy along three ranks, the various traditional methods of delivering fire continued to be employed. During the closing years of the ancien regime, a series of formal tests had demonstrated that the fire of the third rank was ineffective.

Obstructed by the first two ranks, most of the muskets in the third rank were fired harmlessly in the air. To put the soldiers in the third rank to more effective use, and at the same time to address the problem of irregular fire which tended to occur in sustained volley fire, after the Seven Years War the French military developed a new method of delivering fire. This was the feu de rang or 'fire by two ranks', known throughout the English-speaking world as 'firing by files', file firing or running fire. In this system. although the three ranks were to remain standing, only the first and second ranks were actually to fire. The responsibility of the third rank was to reload muskets and pass these to the second rank.

After the command to fire by independent files was given and the men assumed their proper positions, the first and second ranks presented their muskets and fired together. The men in the first rank now reloaded their weapons, delivered and fired again. This process was repeated so that the men in the first rank fired as quickly as possible

The men in the second rank, however, did not reload their weapons but passed their weapon with their right hand to the man directly behind them in the third rank. The man in the third rank gripped the musket with his left hand while handing the soldier in front a loaded musket with his right hand. The latter was now able to present and fire the musket he was just handed. However, after firing the musket he now reloaded his weapon himself and fired it a second time. Only after this second fire did he once again exchange muskets with the man behind him. This routine allowed the man in the second rank to fire twice with the same weapon before passing it back. This ensured that the man in the rear had finished reloading his musket so that as little time as possible was lost between fires. It was always dangerous to have a front rank stand idle and unarmed as it awaited the efforts of those behind. This type of inaction tended to unnerve men and sowed the seeds of panic.

While the men in the second and third ranks followed this routine, the first rank concentrated on firing and reloading their own muskets. There was no attempt to coordinate their efforts with those behind them. Clearly, one of the chief aims of this new system was to allow the men to fire as quickly as possible.

[Editor: we now skip over the part that relates to Napoleonic warfare.

Fire By Files Origins

Although the fire by files method of firing is generally seen as a late eighteenth century development, there are some grounds to believe that its origins can be traced to the fertile mind of Maurice de Saxe. Writing in 1732, de Saxe described a method he recommended to be used when firing at an enemy positioned hehind hedges, a river, etc. The leader of each file was to step forward a pace and aim at individual targets among the enemy in front of him. After firing, he was to hand his musket to the rear and take a loaded one in its place. Because during de Saxe's time the French army still deployed along four ranks, the file leader. chosen from among the best shots, could fire four times before he had to rely on a musket loaded by one of the rear ranks.

Though there are obvious differences between de Saxe's method and that used later by French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, such as when it was to be used, and the supervision of the fire of each group of two files by NCOs in de Saxe's version, both methods obviously share the loading of muskets by the rear ranks and aimed fire in the sense that the individual soldier chose the exact moment when to fire rather than on the word of command. If the fire by files method did not originate from the early fire delivery system described in Mes reveries, it would not be the first tactical practice or method that French authorities had borrowed from the great French marshal.

The Development of Accurate 'Levelling' Practices

Not all military men accepted the quick fire philosophy which came into ever increasing vogue from about 1750 onward. There were those who continued to maintain that accurate fire was far more valuable than a succession of quickly delivered volleys. Over the next several decades another school of thought would slowly emerge which espoused an entirely different philosophy as to how best to utilize infantry fire.

Writing in the 1750s, Colonel James Wolfe, soon to gain immortality on the Plains of Abraham, cautioned younger officers that 'there is no necessity for firing very fast; a cool and well levelled fire, with the pieces carefully loaded, is much more destructive and formidable than the quickest fire in confusion.'

In the era of massed volleys, it was not possible for the individual soldier to aim, in the truest sense of the term. In order to aim properly, the soldier had to coordinate the processing of pointing the firearm at the target with his breathing, and then pull the trigger when he felt that the musket was pointed directly at the intended target.

In other words, in aimed fire, the soldier must always choose the moment to discharge his weapon. In volley fire, an officer, such as a colonel or the company captain determined the exact moment of fire, and it was unlikely that the soldier would have his weapon perfectly aimed at the exact moment when required to fire. As de Saxe pointed out, this produced a fire that was usually several yards from the mark.

The practical solution was to have the men along the firing line 'level' their pieces before each fire. In the case of 'levelling', all the muskets along the line pointed at the same general 'height', such as the middle of the enemies' bodies. At first, even experienced officers were unaware how important it was to have the men properly level their weapons. There was no systematic method of adjusting the weapons' level to account for changes in elevation and distance.

The results of not paying attention to these factors could be, and occaisionally were, castastrophic. Maurice de Saxe as a young soldier at Belgrade (1717) never forgot the complete destruction of two Imperial battalions on a hill. Though they had properly reserved their fire until extremely close range, they only managed to kill about thirty enemy horsemen and within seconds were cut to pieces by the Turkish cavalry. Scarred by this experience, for the remainder of his life de Saxe emotionally proffered this as the classic example of the ineffectiveness and unreliability of infantry fire.

It is difficult for us to fathom that as great a tactical genius as Maurice de Saxe was, he never understood something as simple as the effect of firing downhill on aiming techniques. It was simply that even the most knowledgeable military men of his time did not realize the difficulty of firing at downhill targets and how it was necessary to compensate when firing downhill at close range by further lowering the barrel. This was never intuitively obvious to the soldier, and was psychologically quite difficult to perform, since to the common soldier properly compensating for distance and firing downhill, it would appear that he was about to fire into the ground wel in front of his adversaries!

Such a simple concept as systematically raising or lowering the musket barrel according to the enemy's distance and elevation was extremely slow to emerge in European warfare. However, by the mid-eighteenth century some officers began to understand the necessity of doing just this. The first step was but a modest improvement.

Some officers, especially in the British army. began to admonish their troops to fire 'at the middle of the enemy's body'. Unfortunately, this dictate was applied with little consideration given to range. Troops were made to level at the middle of the enemy's body, whether they were fifty or 120 paces distant, and more often than not the musket balls would lodge in the ground in front of the enemy formation or sail harmlessly over their heads. Before too long, it was noticed that at very close ranges, even when every effort was made to level the muskets at the prescribed height, the troops frequently fired above the enemy's heads. When this occurred during the final moments of an enemy assault, disaster almost invariably followed; the troops, unable to reload in time for another volley, would be forced to flee.

Noticing the tendency for troops to fire high at a nearby enemy, some officers ordered their men to level their pieces lower. Rather than directing their muskets towards the middle of the enemy's body, the men were enjoined to point their weapons at the enemy's knees instead. However, the distance separating the firing troops from their targets still was not considered, and the men levelled their pieces at the enemy's knees, regardless of their range.

In the 1780s, however, a few military experts began to understand the relationship of range to the musket ball's trajectory, and that this had to be systematically taken into account by the levelling process. The further the distance of the target the higher the men had to level their firearms. They would start off by levelling low at the closest ranges. However, as the distance increased the point that had to be aimed at was raised higher and higher until at the limit of the musket's effective range it was necessary to aim several feet over the enemy's heads. The exact amount of elevation, of course, depended upon the distance of the target.

There were a number of reasons why the practice of proper levelling was never universal. Although this advance in military science began to be documented in the professional literature from the 1790s onwards, it is clear from both theoretical writings and battle accounts that its benefits had never been appreciated fully by all officers and their men. Moreover, there continued to be those who advocated the delivery of a rapid succession of volleys, and this practice made it difficult for the men to level properly before each volley.

Reasons For Selecting Fire System

When selecting a fire system an officer responded as much to the needs of the particular situation as he did to the doctrinal directives established by his army's military authorities. So, for example, one might find the same infantry using fire by ranks when deployed in square and warding off charging cavalry, and then later in the same battle firing by files when engaged in a firefight with enemy infantry.

In order for a fire system to be of general use, it had to perform adequately in four or five key areas. Probably the most obvious was whether a method of delivering fire allowed a great amount of fire power to be delivered in the same instant or over a short period of time. However, there were other considerations that were equally important to officers: how well did the fire system allow men to reload after firing; were the officers able to maintain control over the men so that they continued to fire only when ordered; and especially important, if cavalry was near, did the fire system allow a reserve to be maintained? Each fire system performed with varying degrees of success in these areas and thus had advantages and disadvantages. No system was unequivocally the best in all four areas, and this led to the debates that raged in military circles throughout the entire period.

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