Almost all published analyses of Napoleonic tactics concentrate on the fighting that took place on open ground. We hear of the stately evolutions of lines, columns and square; the thunder of hooves as cavalry sweeps gloriously over the turf; the bounding, bouncing curve of roundshot as artillery establishes a wide lethal 'zone of control' in front of its positions. What we do not get, however, is much serious discussion of what happened when armies came to grips inside villages or woods. This is somehow dismissed as 'boring and unimportant'... even though it probably constituted a good half of all the fighting that took place! DEFENDING A BUILDING ) Napoleonic Association Copyright John Eagle. Courtesy of Tom DeVoe. In a recent edition of THE COURIER (Jan-Feb 1983 p.44) I tried to call attention to this rather important neglected aspect of Napoleonic fighting, and it maybe timely now to look at it in greater detail to see what trees and houses could actually do to an infantry battalion in battle. Let's take woods first. What does a wood do to infantry? Well, to some extent "it depends on the wood". If the trees are tall, well-spaced and free from underbrush (e.g., an aging pine plantation where the treetrunks rise clean from a springy carpet of pine needles), each man will be able to see his neighbor; the ranks will be able to retain some semblance of order; and a fairly coherent movement of an entire battalion will be possible. Admittedly the enemy will not be visible until he is quite close -- let's say fifty yards instead of anything up to a kilometre in open terrain -- but this may actually help morale rather than hinder it. An attacker will not feel overlooked and endangered by his opponent until he has reached a decently short range. In these circumstances the good order of the assault may not be jeopardized by the enemy's appearance -- or fire -- until the attackers' bayonets are close enough to make their point! The trees will certainly upset much of the parade-ground alignment of the attack, without any help from the enemy, but they will bring compensating advantages of concealment and protection at medium and long ranges. On the other hand thick woods with lots of shrubbery will tend to act in a different manner altogether. in this case the concealment effect will be so powerful that each man will feel completely isolated from his neighbor' The drill-master's "touch of elbows" will be impossible; and even the essential reassuring sight of a buddy close at hand may disappear. Each man will suddenly sense himself alone in a hostile environment, and the whole cohesion and collective forward impetus of an attack will be lost. Yet at precisely this moment, when each man feels himself so uniquely vulnerable, there will be a blessed dispensation of mercy from the God of War! The soldier who is so fearful and isolated will find himself surrounded by exactly the sort of cover - both from visibility and from bullets-which he needs to protect himself from the savage action of the enemy. In these circumstances it will require little in the way of firing in the vicinity of the soldier to persuade him to go to ground -- and stay there. Napoleonic wood-fighting generally seems to have been long and indecisive, as both sides lurked behind cover blazing away 'into the green'. Since neither side would have the cohesion necessary to press home, the whole affair would tend to degenerate into a formless tiraillade. The only scope for generalship would consist in feeding fresh reinforcements into the line at regular intervals - but these could not be expected to maintain the new impetus for long before they, in turn, would go to ground and perpetuate the stalemate. One British officer described a couple of wood fights near Bayonne in the following terms. The first was on 10th December 1813: "in front of us was a thick wood, for the possession of which our people and the French were warmly struggling. On our side it was garrisoned by a battalion of Portuguese and a couple of British regiments, and it was assaulted by a perfect swarm of French tirailleurs; but neither did the latter succeed in driving their opponents through it, nor could the former deliver themselves from the annoyance of continual assaults. it was particularly the business of the battalion to which I belonged to give support to the defenders of that wood For this purpose company after company went forward, as a fresh supply of men became necessary... [1] On the next day he charged into the wood in person: "As soon as we were fairly into the wood, our compact order was, in spite of every effort, lost. We fought, however, with the same spirit as before, in detached parties, and pressed the enemy on all hands, who became as much divided as ourselves, till not only was the ground recovered which had at first been abandoned, but we were considerably in advance of our original position." [2] In this action the British did eventually achieve a favorable result; but we may be justified in speculating that it was only after a great expenditure of cohesion, time, ammunition -- and probably life as well. One feature of this sort of wood-fighting is that you can get to exceptionally close range of the enemy before fire is exchanged. Not only does the soldier feel vulnerable because he lacks the moral support of his buddies: he actually is more vulnerable insofar as the enemy may find some good opportunities for ambushes at close range. In woods there was a good chance of genuine 'close quarter combat' -- and even bayonet wounds. All the more reason, therefore, for the soldier to be rather cautious about how he advanced. As soon as the enemy was seen it is likely that every man would take cover and open fire, whether or not he had a good target. The result would be a trickle of wounded soldiers seeping out of the opposite edges of the wood (producing a trickle of reinforcements thrown forward to replace them): but not very much movement of the battle lines until at least several hours had passed. Jumbo Illustration: Phases in Woods Fighting Villages With fighting in villages it is likely that the results would be roughly comparable in overall outcome to that of wood fights -- but radically different in pace and style. In a village the visibility is restricted, and the use of precise drill formations is obstructed, no less than in a wood -- but there are otherwise some important distinctions to be drawn. In the first place a village is more of a defined 'point' on the map than a wood. It will usually, though not always, be smaller; it will be easier for a commander to visualise; and it will have a name. This alone will tend to assist the transmission of orders, for it is easier to tell your subordinates to "Seize Corbeaux-les-Epines!" than to say "Keep moving forward through those trees over there." A village somehow makes a more manageable tactical objective than a wood. Apart from anything else it has a defined centre -- maybe a church, a main square, a duck pond, or whatever which can act as a visible symbol for control for the commanders on each side, in a way that is not possible with, say, a particular group of trees at the centre of a copse. A village is therefore a convenient unit of currency in the bartering process of battle. It may change hands many times in the course of a day, even though its ultimate ownership may be decided no more rapidly than that of a wood. A second consideration is that the approaches to a village may be more obstructed than those to a wood. Clearly we cannot make hard and fast rules about this (it all depends on the village); but a treeline in well-tended agricultural country is just what it says, a line. It gives a defender an ideal covered position with a good field of fire to the front. With the edge of a village, by contrast, it is unlikely to be so easy. Admittedly some of the buildings may front directly onto open fields, but in most cases they will tend to form a very irregular line, with visibility restricted by walls, hedges, vineyards and gardens. These may help to break up an attack before it reaches the village proper, but they will also do a great deal to fragment the coherent front of fire which the defender can offer to the enemy. Once again, an attacker can find certain advantages when assaulting a village which he lacks in wood-fighting. In most villages there are also several well-defined avenues of approach which can lead an attacker right into the heart of the defenses. These may be roads or spaces between houses and, unless they have been comprehensively barricaded by the defense, they can be very useful indeed to the assailant. They can draw him close in column into the flanks and rear of the houses which are his objective. Thus the typical sequence in a village fight might be: first a ragged skirmish along the outskirts; then a mass column attack which sweeps aside, and past, the defenders in the outlying gardens and houses. This attack reaches the centre of the village and then breaks down into a number of small unformed groups which break off to capture particular buildings or areas. Taken in flank and rear, and sensing themselves outnumbered, the defenders of each house begin to think it is time for them to depart. The defense crumbles quickly and there is a series of sharp hand-to-hand scuffles in the narrow streets, as small groups of soldiers from each side run into each other and settle the small print of the transfer of the real estate from one side to the other. Once the attacker has achieved his objective he will find it very difficult to regroup his men. The lure of plunder will be particularly strong, since a village is notoriously a storehouse for the good things in life. At Fuentescle Onoro (1811), indeed, the commander of the British 71st regiment led his men into the attack of the village specifically by promising them plunder once they had captured it. His famished troops performed their duty admirably, then: "After the firing had ceased we began to search through the town, and found plenty of flour, bacon and sausages, on which we feasted heartily". [3] Of additional benefit to the attacker must have been the generally flimsy construction of many European villages in this era. Even today a traveller in France can find many rural buildings made of nothing more substantial than a timber frame covered by wattle and daub, ie., wickerwork and mud. Brick or stone buildings were not nearly as common as one might expect and when whole villages were built in these materials (as in the case of Fuentes itself) each house would normally be small, with few windows. Thus no more than a few skirmishers might be able to fire out of each building, and they might easily feel over-awed if assaulted by a battalion in massed column. There were of course exceptions. No wargamer alive today can have failed to hear of Chateau Hougoumont, an imposing brick edifice which dominated the Western flank at Waterloo. At Austerlitz the great stone granary of Sokolnitz performed a similar function for the French, while on the Nive the church and cemetery of Arcangues did as much for the British in their turn. We should also remember that in all these cases we are talking about 'hamlets' and 'villages' rather than 'suburbs' and 'towns'. When Napoleonic fighting moved into a genuinely urban environment it took on an altogether harsher character than in any of the cases mentioned so far. in the apartment blocks of Sarragossa or Naples; in the suburbs of Smolensk or Dresden; at Ebersberg in 1809 or Toulouse in 1814 we get glimpses of this -- and they show us why Napoleonic commanders seem to have avoided such battlefields whenever they could. in these circumstances almost every house was a potential 'Hougoumont', and might require some serious engineering work -- or at least systematic incendiarism -- to clear out its defenders. In most open battles, however, the villages were small and relatively flimsy. They could often be carried quite quickly at the point of the bayonet; their real difficulty lay in the way that they dispersed and disorganized an attack thus laying it open to a counter-stroke. This gives us a clue as to how villages could best be defended. it seemed wasteful or dangerous to put too many troops into the houses themselves, so this duty would normally be assigned to relatively small groups of infantry acting as skirmishers (whether or not they had actually received light infantry training). Their role was to take pot-shots at the enemy as he rushed in and, if he could not be stopped, to fall back on friendly supports. if a "citadel" or "Hougoumont" was available in the centre of the village, they would retire to its shelter. If there was none, they would move back to the open country behind the village and contain the enemy within it. At this moment the enemy would be in his most psychologically vulnerable state, elated by victory but disorganized by his dispersed exertions. He would be ripe for a crushing counter-charge by the defender's reserves that had been held back awaiting just this opportunity. With good handling they would be able to turn the attacker out of his conquests and re-establish the original line with a highly favorable balance of losses in favor of the original defender. At Fuentes the British gave an almost perfect demonstration of this system. In his account of the third day's combat our soldier of the 71st tells us that the buildings held by the British were assaulted by a large French column and cleared within about ninety minutes (actually this probably included three separate cycles of attack and counter-attack, although he does not mention them in his narrative). There were many murderous hand-to-hand encounters in the maze of little streets, but eventually: "Notwithstanding all our efforts, the enemy forced us out of the town, then halted and formed close column betwixt us and it. While they stood thus, the havoc amongst them was dreadful. Gap after gap was made by our cannon, and as quickly filled up. Our loss was not so severe, as we stood in open files (i. e., 'skirmish order'- PG). While we stood thus, firing at each other as quick as we could, the 88th regiment advanced from the lines, charged the enemy and forced them to give way... " [3] After this the enemy was gradually pushed back out of the village, even though reinforced as he retreated through it. This passage reveals the helplessness into which a successful attacker could be thrown. The French were obviously trying to rally their men for a column assault on the far side of the buildings they had captured -- but they were hampered by the British fire, and then thrown back in disorder by the furious charge of the 88th, who, up to that point, had not been committed in the village itself. This counter-attack therefore continued the pendulum-swings which are the hallmark of fighting in villages, and in this case inflicted especially heavy casualties. Jumbo Illustration: Phases in Village Fighting Conclusion In both wood-fighting and village-fighting there can be some ferocious close-quarter fighting in confined spaces, just as there is likely to be a constant succession of reserves fed in from each side as the men in the front line become shattered or exhausted. In both woods and villages the fighting may drag on for hours before any clear "winners and losers" start to emerge. The difference, perhaps, is that in woods the ebb and flow is less dramatic and less sudden than in village fighting. It is less easy to chart the swings of the tactical pendulum, and there seems somehow to be rather less at stake. In villages, by contrast, it makes a stirring line in a bulletin if "Telnitz changed hands four times" or "Plancenoit was taken and re-taken seven times"; the action seems livelier and more charged with importance for the history of the world! Nevertheless despite these differences the two styles of fighting do have quite a lot in common with each other -- and they are both about as far away from the romantic stereotype of formed ranks in open fields as it is possible to get. NOTES My thanks are especially due to Ned Zuparko for the help and encouragement which he gave me in the preparation of this article. [1]G.R. Gleig,'The Subaltern'(New edition, Blackwoods, Edinburgh 1872) p.171. [2] Ibid pp.183-4 [3] C. Hibbert, ed., 'A Soldier of the Seventy First' (New edition, Leo Cooper, London 1975) p.61. [4] Ibid p.63. Back to Table of Contents -- Courier Vol. VI No. 1 Back to Courier List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1985 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com