The History of the British Army. J. W. Fortescue
have passed since sergeants shouldered their rifles as though they carried a different weapon from the men, and officers have only lately ceased to depend on them greatly in matters of drill.
Such was the new infantry of Europe at the close of the fifteenth and the opening of the sixteenth centuries, not yet perfected, but advancing rapidly to an efficiency and importance such as had for many centuries been unknown in Europe. And now the nations poured down into the fair land of Italy to teach each other in that second birthplace of all arts the new-born art of war. France was the first that came; and few armies have caused greater wonder in Europe than that which marched with Charles the Eighth through Florence in 1496. The work begun for the expulsion of the English from France had been steadily continued. Louis the Eleventh had hired Swiss sergeants to drill his infantry, and Picardie, the senior regiment of the old French line, was already in potential existence. But it was not these, but other men who set the Florentines at gaze. For there were to be seen the Scottish archers, the finest body-guard alike for valour and for stature in the world, the Swiss, marching by with stately step and incredible good order, the chivalrous gentlemen of France, mailed from top to toe and gorgeous in silken tabards, riding in all the pride of Agincourt avenged, mounted archers less heavy but more workmanlike as befitted light cavalry, and lastly a great train of brass artillery, cannons and culverins, and falcons, the largest weighing six thousand pounds and mounted on four wheels, the smallest made for shot no bigger than a doctor's pills and travelling on two wheels only. Already the quick-witted French had thought out the principle of the limber, and had made two wheels of their heavy guns removable. Already too they had trained the drivers of the lighter ordnance to move as swiftly as light cavalry.[63]
We cannot follow this army through the triumphs and the disasters of the next half century, but we must needs glance briefly at the rapid progress of French military organisation. Louis the Twelfth took the improvement of his foot-soldiers seriously in hand and increased the number of the companies, or bands as they were called, that had been begun by the bands of Picardy. The number of these bands, permanent and temporary, demanded the appointment of an officer who should be intermediary between the general and the captains of independent companies. About the year 1524 such an officer was established with the new title of colonel,[64] and the companies placed under his command were said, in French, to be under his regiment. The word soon grew to be used in a collective sense, and such and such companies under Colonel A.'s regiment became known simply as Colonel A.'s regiment. The colonel had a company of his own, but having no leisure to attend to it made it over to a captain, who was called the colonel's lieutenant or lieutenant-colonel. Another company was commanded by the sergeant-major, the word sergeant, which we met with first at the very beginning, having come into use in France with a new meaning in the year 1485. As already mentioned in speaking of the landsknechts, the name of sergeant became for some reason bound up with the functions of drill, and the sergeant-major was to the regiment what the sergeant was to the company. He was therefore the only officer who remained on his horse in action, his duties compelling him continually to gallop from company to company for the correction of bad formation, and for the ordering of ranks and files. It will be seen that the sergeant-major, or as we now call him major, originally did the work which is now performed in England by the adjutant.
Captain was of course an old title, and had been used for the chief of a band in France ever since 1355, having been borrowed possibly from the free companies. The captain's locum tenens or lieutenant had been instituted by the reforms of Charles the Seventh in 1444, and together with him his standard-bearer or ensign,[65] but there were other junior officers who came later even than the colonels to supplement the new military vocabulary. In 1534 we encounter for the first time fouriers, caps d'escouade, and lancepessades. The first of these, which existed for a time in the corrupted form furrier, has passed from the English language.[66] The second is the French form of the Italian capo de squadra, head of the square, a reminiscence of the days when men were formed into square blocks, squads or squadrons, which passed into caporal and so into our English corporal. The third, again a French form of the Italian lanz pesato, signified originally a man-at-arms whose horse had been killed and who was therefore compelled to march with the foot. Being a superior person, he was not included among the common infantry-men but held this distinctive and superior rank, whence in due time was derived the prefix of lance to the titles of sergeant and corporal. Finally, in the year 1550 foot-soldiers in France began to be called by the collective name of fanterie or infanterie. This word, too, was a corruption from the Italian, for Italian commanders used to speak of their troops as their boys, fanti, and collectively as fanteria; and from them the term passed into all the languages of Europe. Nothing could better commemorate the situation of Italy in the sixteenth century as at once the cockpit of the nations and the school of the new art of war.
But before leaving France there is another aspect of her military institutions to be touched on. After the death of Francis the First, and particularly during the period of the religious wars, the discipline and tone of the French army underwent woeful deterioration. Captains from the first had been proprietors of their companies, which indeed were sometimes sold at auction by the colonel to the highest bidder; and, as they received a bounty in proportion to the numbers that they could show on their rolls, the rascality and corruption were appalling. The enforcement of strict discipline was bound to cause desertion, and every deserter meant a man the less on the captain's roll and a sum the less in the captain's pocket. No effort therefore was made to restrain the misbehaviour of soldiers when off duty; they were allowed to rob and plunder at their own sweet will, and they had the more excuse since they were encouraged thus to indemnify themselves for the pay stolen from them by their officers. This recognised system of pillage was known as picorée,[67] a word which has passed through the English language in the form of pickeer. Yet another method there was among many of falsifying the muster-rolls, namely on the day of inspection to collect any yokels or men that could be found, thrust a pike into their hands, and present them as soldiers. They were duly passed by the muster-master, and as soon as his back was turned were dismissed, having served their purpose of securing their pay for the illicit gain of the captain till next muster. Such men were called passe-volans, a word which also was received into the military terminology of Europe, and like mortes-payes received at last official recognition. It must not be thought that such abuses were confined to France, but it is significant that she was the country to find names for them.[68] Nor must the reader be unduly impatient over the mention of these details in the military history of foreign nations. The English soldier for the next century and more is going to school, where like all pupils he will learn both good and evil; and it is impossible to follow his progress unless we know something of his schoolfellows as well as of his tutors.
1495.
Atella, 1496.
1503.
1512.
Last of the nations let us glance at Spain, at the close of the fifteenth century just emerging triumphant from eight centuries of warfare against the Moors and girding herself for a great and magnificent career. Her training in war had been against an Oriental foe, swift, active, and cunning, and it is not surprising that when first she entered the field of Italy and met the massive columns of the Swiss at Seminara she should have given way before them. But at the head of the Spanish troops was a man of genius, Gonsalvo of Cordova, who was quick to learn from his enemies. Confining himself for a time to the guerilla warfare which he understood the best, he mingled pikes among the short swords and bucklers which were the distinctive weapons of the Spanish infantry, and within a year had gained his first victory over the Swiss. His next campaign found him with a body of landsknechts in his pay, when he quickly perceived the possibilities that lay not only in the pikes but still more in the fire-arms which they brought with them. Before the year was past he had routed Swiss infantry and French cavalry in two brilliant actions at Cerignola and on the Garigliano, and fairly driven them out of Naples. He then set himself to remodel the Spanish foot by the experience which he had gathered in his later campaigns, and this with full appreciation of the moral and physical peculiarities of his countrymen. Thus though it was in the Spanish tongue that the pike was first named the queen of weapons, yet the value of the sword in the hand of a supple active people was never overlooked, and at Ravenna no less than Cerignola the rush of nimble stabbing Spaniards under the