Three mid-18th Century innovations would ultimately have a profound effect on the way infantry attacked or defended:

• The increased availability of gunpowder, allowing each soldier to be supplied with many more cartridges
• 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 King Frederick William of Prussia.

King Frederick William of Prussia required his infantry to untiringly practice loading and firing their muskets, a procedure known in the military as the 'manual of arms'. Through this seemingly endless rehearsal, Frederick William and Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau (the Old Dessauer) 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 (War of Austrian Succession), 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 the battle.

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 was based partly on the Prussian adoption of rigorous infantry training and the cadenced manual of arms. They were also indebted to the increased availability of gunpowder. Prior to this, ammunition had been very much more restricted and the average infantry was sent into battle with less than 25 cartridges. This was significantly less than the 50 to 60 cartridges carried by soldiers during the Seven Years War.

The quality of gunpowder improved over the course of the 18th Century; however, it was a major factor in limiting the rate of fire over a long period of time, say the course of a battle. This meant a musket would invariably become fouled after firing only a fraction of the total number of cartridges. Until the muskets were cleaned properly, troops could not be expected to fire effectively for the duration of the battle. The initial volleys were often sufficient to decide the matter on a unit level.

One of the reasons usually attributed to the success of the Prussian infantry was ability to 'outshoot' the opposing infantry, or more accurately, to give the impression that it was out shooting its opponents. Due to its training, the Prussian infantry was able to deliver relatively ordered volleys much more quickly than its counterpart in other western European armies. The Austrians and other German states were the first to emulate the Prussian example; the British quickly followed them. This new tactic of firing as quickly as possible was known in the 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 sufficiently 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 practice 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

Prior to 1740, the volley mechanism was orchestrated so that the unit commander 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 firefight was eschewed. The commander 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 command. Every step in the process was designed to allow the commander to retain control over each action in the firing procedure. The advent of the '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 unit commander 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; and
• 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.

With the emphasis on quick fire, each firing could discharge as little as four or five seconds after its predecessor. After several volleys, however; 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 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. In some armies such as the French, quick fire doctrine was relegated to defensive applications only.

The Prussians claimed that their trained infantry could fire 5 rounds per minute, and military leaders generally accepted this. Various tests were conducted to determine how many firings an experienced soldier could deliver within a predetermined length of time.

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, after which the musket barrel became too hot to hold and load using a cadenced manual of arms. While it was not uncommon for firefights to last for an extended period of time, the rate of fire was probably lower than in the theoretical tests.

More Small Arms Tactics

Introduction
The Quick Fire Philosophy
Firing By Files Philosophy
The Development of Accurate 'Levelling' Practices