Musings, Rare Articles and Book Reviews…

ELEMENTS OF NAPOLEONIC WARFARE

Napoleon was not a great innovator but imposed his genius and personal leadership on the huge, largely conscript armies he inherited from the Revolution. He perfected their offensive, mobile and ruthless way of war, but though he often wrote and talked about the so-called principles of war he never enumerated them or wrote a comprehensive account of his own ideas.

 

Essentially he was a pragmatist, explaining that in war ‘there are no precise or definite rules’ and that ‘the art of war is simple, everything is a matter of execution’. Even so, it is possible to deduce some constant elements from his campaigns, many already evident in Ital~ Napoleon was convinced that unity of command was essential. ‘In war,’ he informed the Directoire, ‘one bad general is better than two good ones.’ He always fought offensively even when on the strategic defence – the destruction of the enemy’s main field army, rather than the occupation of territory or the enemy’s capital, his primary objective.

 

Strategic deployments were planned carefully. Even before hostilities opened efforts were made to shroud the emperor’s intention. Newspapers were censored, borders closed, travellers detained. Swarms of light cavalry screened the army’s advance and gathered intelligence about the location of the enemy. The self-contained corps marched along separate but parallel routes, deployed to cover the entire area of operations. When the main enemy body was located, Napoleon would close up deployment to bring his corps within supporting distance, adopting a loosely quadrilateral formation known as the bataillon carre. The first corps to contact the enemy would engage to pin him, while the others would hurry to its support. When concentration had been achieved Napoleon often disposed of superior numbers, but if this proved impossible he manoeuvred to gain local superiority at the decisive point. Still, several of his battles were won only by the fortuitous arrival of detached forces.

 

Success depended on tight security, good intelligence, precise staff work and, above all, great marching feats. Of these, the last two were difficult to achieve. In round numbers, 30,000 marching infantry required 8 kilometres of good road; 60 guns with their caissons took up 4 kilometres, and 6,000 cavalry, riding four abreast, needed about 7 kilometres. And strategic approach marches were long. In September-October 1805 several corps marched up to 300 kilometres in ten days; and in December Davout’s corps, urgently summoned to Austerlitz, covered over 100 kilometres in two days; with an ample road network the bataillon carre formation was capable of rapid, large-scale movements.

 

In battle, as in his strategic approach, Napoleon always favoured the offensive. In all of his battles he stood only three times on the defensive at Leipzig in 1813, and at La Rothiere and Arcis in 1814 – and each time only after his initial attack had failed. Napoleon’s battle plans – grand tactics – were similar to his strategic pattern. There were three major variants: the central position, the flanking envelopment and the frontal attack. The first he used when the enemy outnumbered his troops. He would seize the initiative, taking up a central position to divide the hostile forces. Then, while a portion of his troops engaged one part of the enemy force, he turned his main body against the other and defeated it. Finally, the main force would join the pinning force against the second opponent. In his second variant the flanking attack sometimes expanded into a full-scale envelopment, and involved one part of his army engaging the enemy front while a sudden attack crushed one of the flanks. If an envelopment was feasible there would be a holding action pinning the enemy, while the bulk of the army swept around him in forced marches – the famed manoeuvre sur les derrieres – which compelled him either to surrender or to give battle with no satisfactory line of retreat. Finally, if time, terrain or the opponent’s dispositions made either of these approaches impossible, there was the frontal attack, weakening the centre by threatening the flanks, and then launching the breakthrough force, the masse de rupture. Such attacks, however, required the use of combined arms, infantry, cavalry and artillery operating together with careful timing; they were costly and rarely successful.

 

A large part of Napoleon’s success depended on his ability to inspire his subordinate commanders and his men. Courage and resolution were essential qualities for a general. Seniority counted for little and intellect alone even less. As he once said, ‘I cannot abide promoting desk officers; I only like officers who make war.’ If bravery and success were essential, favour also played a role, and he always retained a special regard for those who had served with him in Italy and Egypt.

 

Napoleon believed that personal leadership, coupled with appeals to pride, inspired men to fight, maintaining that ‘the morale and opinion of the army are more than half the battle’. He understood that it was not, in the long run, the ideals of the nation, or of the Republic or the Revolution that motivated men. It was the army’s romance of itself, expressed by symbols and legends. ‘The military,’ he is reported to have said, ‘is a freemasonry and I am its Grand Master’; he reinforced these feelings both by personal rewards and recognition of corporate achievement. His personal charisma and his carefully fostered relations with his troops were most effective, even when luck had deserted him. Wellington believed that Napoleon’s presence in battle was worth two corps.

Book Review: The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of his Lost Library.

Marcus Tanner. The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of his Lost Library. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. xx + 265 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-12034-9.

Reviewed by Phillip Haberkern (Department of Religion, Princeton University)
Published on H-German (November, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Manuscript Culture at the Boundaries of the Renaissance

At its core, The Raven King is a book about books. Although nearly half of the book is comprised of a more conventional biography of the king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus (r. 1458-90), the heart of Marcus Tanner’s new monograph is its account of the production, procurement, display, and dissolution of Corvinus’s library over the course of his life and in the aftermath of his death. In the process of describing how the Hungarian king’s appetite for manuscripts led to his accumulation of one of the largest libraries in Europe, Tanner also illuminates a number of other important themes in contemporary Renaissance research, including the spread of humanist ideals from Italy to the edges of Europe; the political benefit of relationships between royal houses and humanist authors; and the ways in which objects and their public display could confer cultural and political legitimacy to their possessors. The twin processes of the creation and destruction of Corvinus’s library would seem ideal lenses through which to view all of these themes, and at certain places in this book they are. Unfortunately, though, the larger narrative in which Tanner’s account of the library’s existence is embedded tends to obscure his insights into the dense, international networks of cultural and political exchange that crisscrossed Renaissance Europe. Indeed, Tanner attempts to situate his history of the library within an epic political narrative of late medieval Europe, and the end result is that the broad strokes of the latter prevent the author from maintaining sufficient focus on the fine details that make his portrayal of the former so interesting.

The work is structured as a biography of Matthias Corvinus, and Tanner does well to provide an outline of the Hungarian king’s life. As Tanner points out, Corvinus constructed a state that incorporated pieces of present-day Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Austria, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic, thus creating a central European “superpower” in the fifteenth century. This political and military success was made more remarkable by the fact that the previous king of Hungary had executed Corvinus’s brother, and that Corvinus himself was imprisoned for several years before his surprise coronation in 1458. Tanner documents how Corvinus used political patronage, marriage alliances, reforms to Hungary’s system of taxation, and his “quick wit and a talent for dissimulation” (p. 65) in order to establish himself securely on the throne. More interestingly, Tanner highlights the problems of legitimacy that Corvinus faced as a royal parvenu and his consequent employment of humanist authors to shape his public image. Drawing on his family’s history as successful fighters against the Ottomans and his own patronage of learning, Corvinus effectively had himself cast as an ideal Platonic philosopher-king who combined the military strength of David with the wisdom of Solomon.

According to Tanner, the main vehicle for this remarkable case of Renaissance self-fashioning was Corvinus’s library, a collection that may have contained upwards of 2,500 works by the time of his death. Tanner vividly portrays the processes by which Corvinus and his agents gathered the books for his library, and the sections describing the copying and illumination of manuscripts, book-buying voyages by Corvinus’s representatives, and competition for the purchase of existing libraries are the book’s best. They capture a culture marked by intellectual ferment, conspicuous consumption, political ambition, and the mercenary intersection of skilled artists and patrons who desired beautiful objects that could communicate their wealth, power, and legitimacy. They also show the development of a pan-European society that was an avid importer of ideas and practices that originated among the Italian humanists and cities. Tanner depicts the Hungarian king as a determined, successful consumer of Renaissance culture and its literary output. He traces the development of Corvinus’s library from its origins in the travels and purchases of the Hungarian humanist Janus Pannonius, through the organization of the collection under the librarian Taddeo Ugoleto, to the feverish purchases and orders made by Corvinus in his last years. The book also reports on the library’s dissolution after Corvinus’s death: the sale of books by his successor, Ladislaus Jagiellon; the theft of many volumes by foreign ambassadors and visitors; the general neglect of the remaining collection and the physical library; and the seizure of the remaining works in the wake of the Ottoman sack of Buda in 1526. The final chapters of the book detail the place of this “lost library” in the imagination of later bibliophiles and the Hungarian people as a whole. For centuries, the appearance of ancient “Corvinas” could cause a stir among European intellectuals, and during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Hungarian scholars sought manuscripts in Istanbul and around Europe as artifacts of Hungary’s golden age under Corvinus. Although relatively few of Corvinus’s books were ever returned to Hungary, those that were were “enormously significant political as well as cultural symbols” (p. 204); they represented the last remnants of a powerful, autonomous Hungary whose ruler had made the kingdom one of the centers of European culture.

As he acknowledges in the preface, Tanner spent years tracking down extant “Corvinas” and cataloguing the efforts of earlier scholars to reconstruct the contents and size of Matthias Corvinus’s library. As such, the sections of the book dealing with the library are meticulously researched and rest on a solid scholarly foundation. The chief problem with the work is that the same cannot be said for the remainder of the book. In his desire to situate Corvinus and his library within their broader cultural contexts, Tanner offers cursory examinations of other kingdoms and courts, and his historical narrative depends entirely on secondary sources, the vast majority in English. As a result, it can seem somewhat limited, or even simplistic. This impression is strengthened by Tanner’s tendency towards rendering personal judgments on the figures who populate his account. Primarily, Tanner is remarkably sympathetic to Corvinus; he acknowledges that the book “seems suffused with the message ‘vive le roi’” (p. xvii), and the nostalgia that suffuses his account of Corvinus’s court borders on the hagiographic. Tanner does acknowledge Corvinus’s failure to construct institutions (notably a university) to preserve the cultural gains made under his patronage. This recognition is superseded, though, by a romantic image of Corvinus that corresponds in many ways to that of the nineteenth-century scholars who pursued the king’s raven-stamped manuscripts. The book’s valorization of Corvinus is offset, if not balanced, by its condemnation of other figures. The nephew of Corvinus’s second wife, Ippolito d’Este, is a particular target of Tanner’s, despite the fact that Corvinus himself granted Ippolito the archbishopric of Esztergom at age seven. Bizarrely, Tanner’s final words on Ippolito are that he led a “hedonistic existence” and died from a “surfeit of crayfish” (p. 147). Frustratingly, no citation explains this fantastic death, so the reader is left with only a moralizing dismissal.

The sporadic footnotes throughout the text can be frustrating. For instance, a long quotation from a Hungarian parliamentary decree of 1844 has no citation to the original source (p. 193), leaving interested readers at a loss. The book’s editor also elects not to use Slavic diacritics, perhaps in an effort not to overwhelm readers with unfamiliar letters and sounds. It is possible that the paucity of the scholarly apparatus, these textual choices, and the broad scope of the book’s narrative were aimed at expanding the readership of this book to a popular market; those decisions, however, have consequences. It is true that the story of Corvinus’s meteoric rise to, and canny consolidation of, political and cultural influence has been relatively inaccessible to an English-speaking audience up until now. Tanner therefore performs a valuable service in presenting Corvinus to a new audience, but the compromises made in the text in order to achieve this goal also diminish the text’s suitability for a scholarly audience and limit its potential use in the classroom.

In short, The Raven King is a baffling book. On the one hand, it presents a fascinating study of patronage, classical learning, and book production in the fifteenth century. It moves easily from the cities of the Italian peninsula to Corvinus’s court in “barbarian” Hungary in order to explore the intellectual, dynastic, and cultural links that bound Renaissance Europe together. It offers a welcome geographical expansion to the cultural history of the Italian Renaissance, as well as an excellent analysis of the production and dissemination of manuscripts in the earliest years of print culture. On the other hand, however, the history of learning and the court culture of Matthias’s Buda is uncomfortably framed by a sweeping history of late medieval Europe that never quite decides if it is intended for a popular or scholarly audience. This indecision ultimately leads to a historical narrative that lacks sufficient scholarly grounding and frequently resorts to anecdotal, speculative, or melodramatic interpretations of events. As a result, this book’s potential contribution to our greater comprehension of the culture of the Renaissance gets obscured. Much like Corvinus’s manuscripts, the complex interactions between political power, cultural borrowing, and intellectual consumption in the fifteenth century described in The Raven King get lost within the narrative of Hungary’s history.

THE ‘INVINCIBLE’ ARMADA, 1588

We found that many of the enemy’s ships held great advantage over us in combat, both in their design and in their guns, gunners and crews … so that they could do with us as they wished. But in spite of all this, the duke [Medina Sidonia] managed to bring his fleet to anchor in Calais roads, just seven leagues from Dunkirk … and if, on the day we arrived there, Parma had come out [with his forces] we should have carried out the invasion.

DON FRANCISCO DE BOBADILLA, the Armada’s senior military officer, 20 August 1588

The defeat of the Spanish Armada marked a major turning point in world history. To be sure, the popular view that the Armada marked the beginning of England’s rise and Spain’s decline is overstated, but if Philip II’s grand design had succeeded we would be living in a very different world. Beyond its immediate consequences – which were considerable – the Armada tells us a great deal about warfare at sea during a pivotal period of change.

 

The first link in the chain of proximate causation that led to the defeat of the Armada was forged in April 1572, when Queen Elizabeth, bowing to Spanish pressure, ordered Dutch privateers to be expelled from English ports. With good intelligence of Spanish dispositions, and nowhere else to go, they returned home and seized the port of Brill. Welcomed by their fellow Protestants, and finding the Duke of Alba’s army overextended, they seized Flushing and Enkhuizen in May, re-igniting the rebellion that the duke thought he had snuffed out in 1567-8.

 

Unable to stand up to the Spanish in the field, the Dutch proved tenacious in siege warfare and quickly learned the value of their waterways. Alive to the advantages of water transport in a land with more canals than roads, Alba created a navy to support his endeavours, but could not sustain it. Its only success was cutting off Haarlem from resupply in the spring of 1573, and from that point Dutch control of inland waters did much to counter the skill and fortitude of the Army of Flanders. The high point of Spanish fortunes came in the summer of 1585, under the captain-generalcy of Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma. Perhaps the finest general of his day, Parma had confined the rebellion to Holland, Zealand and Utrecht, with a relentless campaign of sieges, taking Antwerp in August. That May the Spanish had embargoed all northern vessels in Spanish ports. All but Dutch ships were eventually released, but the act gave Elizabeth casus belli.

 

Up to that point Elizabeth had condoned a private war against Spain, but stopped short of openly declared hostilities. Now, facing the very real possibility that Protestantism would be throttled in the Netherlands, and with England next in line, she reacted aggressively, allying herself with the Dutch, dispatching an expeditionary force to Flanders and sending a fleet under Francis Drake to ravage the Canaries and the Caribbean. That gave Philip the excuse he needed: when Alvaro de Bazan offered to plan an invasion of England he responded positively and asked Parma to do the same.

 

Bazan, no doubt overstating his requirements out of caution, advocated a massive expedition to be launched from Lisbon. Parma (after an extended delay, for he was unenthusiastic about diverting his forces) proposed a less costly, but more daring, plan: a surprise crossing of the Channel in local shipping. Philip, no doubt recoiling from the cost of Bazan’s proposal, settled on a hybrid plan: Bazan would take a fleet into the Channel, rendezvous with Parma and convoy him to England. Orders to that effect were dispatched to Bazan and Parma in July 1586. In terms of tonnage of ships, numbers of troops, quantities of arms, munitions and provisions and distance covered, it would be the most ambitious European naval enterprise to date, ultimately numbering 130 to 140 ships, over 90 of them of 200 tons displacement or more, carrying some 7,000 sailors and 19,000 soldiers. Parma would assemble 27,000 troops at their embarkation ports, along with 270 vessels to carry them to England. These things were not done easily.

 

Galleys aside, the only purpose-built warships available were three Portuguese galleons, survivors of those seized in 1580, and four Neapolitan galleasses. To these we can add 17 galleons, including 10 of Spain’s Indies Guard, which were designed to haul bullion and protect treasure convoys. The bulk of the Armada’s carrying capacity consisted of impressed merchantmen, armed with whatever could be found, and lightly armed hulks (the generic term for large merchantmen).

 

A fleet under Drake raided Cadiz in April 1587, destroying twenty-four ships and immense quantities of supplies. Drake’s presence put the Indies convoys at risk. Bazan sailed for the Azores to bring them home, and indeed did so, but at considerable cost in terms of wear and tear on both ships and crews. A November storm battered up the Armada in harbour; Bazan died in February 1588.

 

Bazan’s replacement was the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was short on combat experience afloat, but a superb administrator. Recognizing the enormity of his task, he begged to be excused, but his pleas and subsequent arguments against the wisdom of the enterprise fell on deaf ears, for Philip knew that God approved. Due largely to the duke’s competence, the Armada finally cleared the Tagus river on 30 May 1588, but with bad cooperage and putrefying provisions partly a consequence of Drake’s destruction of barrel staves in Cadiz in the previous year. Scattered by a storm while putting into La Coruna (Corunna for fresh supplies, the Armada was further delayed, finally departing on 21 July: After yet another storm on 27 July that cost it two days and four galleys, the Armada entered the Channel on 30 July: Formed in a deep line abreast, with rearward-curving wings tipped by its most capable warships to discourage attacks from the flanks and rear, it seemed unstoppable.

 

To face this juggernaut England could muster twenty-three large royal warships, almost all race-built galleons, some thirty large private warships and a host of smaller vessels. High Admiral Lord Howard of Effingham had been persuaded by Drake, his newly appointed vice admiral, to bring the bulk of his force west to Plymouth, leaving a small squadron under Lord Henry Seymour in the Downs, a roadstead off the south-eastern coast of England, to watch Parma. Informed of the Armada’s approach by a watchful pinnace, the English warped out of Plymouth during the night and gained the wind. Medina Sidonia had already missed his first, and probably best, chance of victory two days earlier by rejecting suggestions to sail directly for Plymouth and blockade the English in port rather than wait to assemble his entire fleet. The Spanish superiority in a boarding fight was evident, as was the English advantage in stand-off gunnery. Indeed, Philip had warned Medina Sidonia in April 1588 that ‘the enemy’s intention will be to fight at long range on account of his advantage in artillery … to fire low and sink his opponent’s ships’, and so it was, although not as anticipated. The English formed line and passed alongside the Spanish, harrying them with broadsides, but not to any discernable effect. The only advantage came from accidents among the Spanish (a powder explosion and a series of collisions on 31 July) that delivered two ships to the English the next day – one of them the powerful Nuestra Señora del Rosario – along with several tons of gunpowder.

 

On 2 August, the English tried to penetrate the Armada’s interior, only to be met by powerful warships that had been detailed by Medina Sidonia to protect the merchantmen and hulks. The wind  dropped for a time, enabling the galleasses to bring their powerful guns briefly to bear, threatening to close and board. Medina Sidonia then reorganized the Armada, placing the hulks and merchantmen in the vanguard, protected by a rearguard of his best warships. On 3 August, the English, newly formed into four squadrons led by Howard, Drake, John Hawkins and Martin Frobisher, blocked the Spanish from the Solent, thereby preventing a descent on the Isle of Wight. By now it was clear that the English could bring their guns to bear at will, but that they were doing little harm.

 

Several hot actions took place on 3 and 4 August, notably Drake in his flagship Revenge, in which the English closed to substantially shorter ranges than previously, perhaps experimenting to see if they could inflict damage. The experiments, if they were that – the convincing hypothesis is Colin Martin’s and Geoffrey Parker’s, advanced in their seminal work on the Armada – were successful. Having learned that close-in gunnery was effective, the English backed off to conserve powder.

 

The fleets disengaged on the 5 August, the Armada ploughing stolidly ahead and the English shadowing it, now low on powder and frantically resupplying. On 6 August, Medina Sidonia, having heard nothing from Parma and fearful of over-shooting his rendezvous, brought the Armada to anchor off Calais, within 25 miles of Parma’s embarkation ports. That evening he received his first word from Parma.

 

Parma had thoroughly outfoxed the Dutch, avoiding the attentions of a blockading squadron under Prince Justin of Nassau, and successfully concealing his intentions, but had held his men back from their ports for reasons of deception. This detail revealed a fatal flaw in Philip’s plan: lacking a deep-water port in Flanders or control of the Channel, it required precise co-ordination, something that is exceedingly difficult to achieve with large and heterogeneous forces, both then and now. In fact, Parma ordered embarkation to proceed as soon as he learned that the Armada was at Calais, and within forty-eight hours he was ready, poised to strike.

 

Meanwhile Lord Howard had anchored within sight of the Armada and was receiving reinforcements by the hour, Seymour among them. A council of war decided to send in fireships, and preparations were made according. Caught in an exposed roadstead, and with an offshore breeze, Medina Sidonia ordered his captains to set a second anchor.

 

At around midnight on 7 August eight small ships stuffed with combustibles warped in with the tide. Medina Sidonia had posted a screen of small craft as a precaution and their crews managed to tow two-of the fireships clear. The rest proceeded on course, their crews taking to the boats; it was perfectly timed and executed. At the sight of the approaching flames, the Spanish panicked, chopping cables and leaving anchors behind. No ship was burned, but the attack succeeded beyond expectations. Dawn found the Armada scattered and the flag galleass aground.

 

The ensuing battle, named after nearby Gravelines, was intense and confused. Medina Sidonia’s flagship, San Martin, and four of his best galleons sought to interpose themselves between the rest of the Armada and the English. They fought with admirable fortitude and were generally successful, but the English, using their agility and firepower to full advantage for the first time, closed and inflicted terrible damage. The wind drove the battle north. One galleon was sunk outright and Medina Sidonia’s five stalwarts were mauled. By day’s end, the flag galleass had been destroyed and the Armada driven so far to windward that any hope of-a rendezvous with Parma was gone. Medina Sidonia gave orders-to proceed home the long way round. Most of the galleons made it, a tribute to their design and construction. Many of the rest did not, being driven against the Scottish or Irish coasts and wrecked, their anchors still lying on the bottom off Calais and not available when needed.

 

It was a close-run thing. Had one of Medina Sidonia’s numerous messages to Parma announcing his intentions and progress arrived in time – a real possibility – Parma could have been ready when the Armada arrived. The English had been unable to stop the Armada and Parma would have had his escort. Had his veterans made it ashore there can be no doubt that they would have made mincemeat of Elizabeth’s militia.

 

It did not happen. England remained Protestant and Elizabeth queen. The Dutch Revolt prospered. The Royal Navy was vindicated as the core of England’s defence, but that same navy proved incapable of offensive strategic decision. English raids could be highly destructive – that on Cadiz in 1596 far surpassing Drake’s earlier attack – but accomplished little beyond increasing Spanish defence expenditure, including the creation of a navy which, though unable to succeed where the Armada had failed, effectively protected the treasure fleets. The war wore on in inconclusive attrition until Elizabeth’s death in 1603 and the truce called by her successor James I in the following year.

Battle of Fleurus – 26 June 1794

The Austrian and Anglo-Allied armies successfully threatened the French occupation of Belgium and Holland in the spring of 1794, with a counteroffensive forcing them to withdraw their armies to the French frontiers. The Committee of Public Safety dispatched the bloodthirsty deputy St Just to ensure the armies and their commanders understood the severity of the situation. General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, temporarily removed from command in 1793, was appointed general-in-chief of the new Army of the Sambre et Meuse. Jourdan crossed the Sambre at the end of June, besieged Charleroi and deployed his army in a semicircle to prevent the Austrian relief army from reaching the city. On 26 June, the Prince of Sachsen-Coburg attacked Jourdan around Fleurus. After a desperate battle in which Jourdan’s flanks broke, his ability to rapidly deploy his reserves, combined with the steadfastness of his centre, forced the allies to withdraw from the field with heavy casualties.

The campaign in Belgium, which culminated in the battle of Fleurus, occurred at the moment when the radical revolution in France, the Reign of Terror, achieved its domestic goals of purging its enemies from the National Convention. The Committee of Public Safety, the executive committee of the National Convention, composed of 12 representatives, was responsible for safeguarding the security of the revolution against its domestic and foreign enemies. Lazare Carnot, one of the 12, presided over the war ministry and established a sense of order and centralized direction to French war efforts. It was commonplace for the Convention to dispatch representatives to the various armies on the frontiers to ensure their patriotic fervour and keep a watchful eye on the generals. The Committee had made a habit of calling generals to Paris to answer for their failures or lack of determination to press the campaign as demanded by the Convention. Victorious commanders such as the Comte de Custine (1740-93) and Jean Houchard (1739-93) were denounced before the republican government in 1793 and executed. Jourdan had commanded the Army of the North in Belgium in 1793 when Carnot was the representative en mission. Jourdan’s victory at Wattignies was won with Carnot’s direct interference, and shortly thereafter Jourdan was dismissed from command. In June 1794, Carnot restored him to the army as commander of the ‘Sambre and Meuse’. It was a new army composed of the right wing of the Army of the North, the Army of the Ardennes and most of the ‘Rhine and Moselle’. With the Sambre and Meuse were six future Napoleonic marshals: Jourdan (its commander), François Lefebvre (1755-1820), Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763-1844), Edouard Mortier (1768-1835), Nicolas Soult (1769-1851) and Michel Ney (1769-1815).At the time, the last two were junior officers; the first three were generals.

 

The Anglo-Imperial armies in Belgium were divided between an Anglo-Austrian army under Frederick (1763-1827), Duke of York, and the Count of Clerfayt (1733-98) and the main Habsburg army under the Prince of Sachsen-Coburg (1737-1815). The coalition forces in Belgium outnumbered the French. However, the Duke of York drew his army ever closer to the Channel coast, as General Charles Pichegru’s (1761-1804) Army of the North pressed towards the city of Tournai. Although it is possible to believe that Pichegru’s move was a deliberate plan to draw the Allied armies apart, only the British left wing was within operational distance of Coburg’s army. Coburg detached forces under General Jean Pierre Beaulieu (1725-1819) to protect Namur from a French advance along the Meuse, while he concentrated his forces around Quatre Bras to the west, covering the strategic city of Charleroi.

 

The French had consistently failed to cross the Sambre and take Charleroi. The city’s defences were considerable, and the proximity of Coburg’s army prevented the French from carrying out a formal siege before they had defeated it. Carnot considered Charleroi a principal objective, since it would enable further French forces to move unmolested along a parallel axis with the Army of the North. Indeed, in 1815, during the first days of the Waterloo campaign Napoleon saw Charleroi as his gateway to Belgium and seized it quickly, before the British or Prussian armies could take it. The Revolutionary authorities therefore created Jourdan’s Army of the Sambre and Meuse in order to concentrate sufficient force to take the city and press into Belgium. The presence of Louis de Saint Just (1767-94) with the army was a clear indication of the critical importance the Committee collectively placed upon the city’s capture and the subsequent defeat of Allied forces. Jourdan crossed the Sambre on 18 June. He bombarded Charleroi and tasked General Jacques Maurice Hatry’s (1742-1802) division with the siege. He deployed the remainder of the army, six divisions, in a semi-circle 1.6-3.2km (1-2 miles) from Charleroi. Saint-Just busied himself providing motivation and oversight for the siege, while Jourdan prepared for the imminent arrival of Coburg’s relief army.

 

The Austrian columns were divided, however, with Beaulieu covering Namur to the east, while the preponderance of Coburg’s forces lay to the northwest towards Brussels. The Duke of York refused to bring his force further inland and leave Ostend, his lifeline to England, unprotected against Pichegru’s army. The Prince of Orange (1748-1806), commanding Austrian and Dutch troops, however, moved east to unite with Coburg. All told, the Allied army had 45,700 men and 98 artillery pieces. Jourdan’s strength was greater, some 72,000 men.

 

Coburg Arrives

The battle of Fleurus illustrates the flexibility of the French divisional system compared with the eighteenth-century ad hoc column, and its benefit to the command and control of armies. On 25 June, Coburg’s army approached Charleroi. Coburg intended to assail Jourdan’s position, pressing him front and flank with five separate columns. The Prince of Orange with 13,000 men on the right, General Peter Quasdanovich (1738-1802) with 6400 men in the centre and, towards Coburg’s left, two columns (15,500 men) under the command of the Archduke Charles (1771-1847) would advance through Fleurus towards Charleroi. On Coburg’s far left was Beaulieu’s column of 10,300 men, brushing the Sambre. Jourdan arrayed his divisions 4.8km (3 miles) from the city. General Jean-Baptiste Kéber’s (1753-1800) corps d’armee of two divisions were in front of Courcelles, facing the Prince of Orange. A brigade defended the Sambre at Landelies, south of Kléber’s position. To the east, along the Sambre, General François Marceau’s (1769-96) weak division held the woods beyond Lambusart. Jourdan personally directed the centre with two divisions, between Gosselies and Heppignies, which he fortified with a redoubt and heavy guns. Lefebvre’s division took up an entrenched position between Wagnee and Fleurus. Although Jourdan outnumbered Coburg, his position was extended, with a besieged city to his rear. Fortunately the garrison of Charleroi had surrendered the city the previous day, allowing Jourdan to deploy Hatry’s division in reserve, with the cavalry around the town of Ransart.

 

The Prince of Orange led the Allied attack, moving his battalions and squadrons across the Piéton stream in three smaller columns; one advancing on Fontaine l’Eveque, and the other two towards Courcelles. General Anne Charles Basset de Montaigu’s (1751-1821) division, holding the French flank, came under immense pressure, and under heavy fire withdrew upon Courcelles. General Charles Daurier’s (1761-1833) brigade at Landelies advanced against Orange’s columns, only to be assailed by cavalry, artillery fire and infantry. They too withdrew. By 10 a.m. Orange was threatening to roll up the left flank. Montaigu and Daurier, south of Courcelles, re-formed and counterattacked, halting the Austrians. Kléber, with General Guillaume Duhesme’s (1766-1815) division northeast of Courcelles, detached a brigade and rushed it to the flank. Fighting raged for the next two hours. Kléber fed Bernadotte’s brigade into the battle and, by 2 p.m., he had compromised Orange’s position and forced the prince to order a general withdrawal back across the Piéton.

 

While Kléber fought to hold the left flank, Jourdan faced a greater crisis on his right. Quasdanovich’s column moved forward from Frasnes on the French centre. General Antoine Morlot’s (1766-1809) division bore the brunt of the attack. After heavy fighting for much of the day, Morlot was forced back towards Gosselies. Quasdanovich occupied Jourdan’s front as the Archduke Charles and Beaulieu threw their weight against the divisions of Lefebvre, Marceau and General Jean Etienne Championnet (1762-1800). The Archduke Charles’s columns vigorously assailed the French entrenchments between Fleurus and Heppignies. A redoubt with 18 heavy guns supported Championnet’s 140 position. The Austrian column attacking there floundered in the face of artillery fire and musketry. Lefebvre, too, held his own against Charles’s other column. A crisis, however, soon threatened the entire right flank, as Beaulieu’s column broke Marceau’s division, which fled through Lambusart, leaving Lefebvre’s right in the wind. Shortly thereafter Charles renewed his attack, supported by concentrated artillery fire plus cavalry. Championnet lost the redoubt and fell back beyond Heppignies.

 

Lefebvre was in a desperate situation. He detached Colonel Soult with three battalions and some cavalry, refusing the flank and occupying entrenchments at Campinaire. Beaulieu’s column ran headlong into Soult’s troops, now supported by the remnants of Marceau’s division.

 

Jourdan observed his centre press back, and Austrian battalions in two lines advance from Heppignies towards Ransart. He immediately directed General Paul-Alexis Dubois’ (1754-96) Cavalry Reserve against their serried ranks. The Austrian first line broke against the charge, while the second formed square. Championnet advanced to support and the Austrians withdrew, leaving all their light artillery. Lefebvre was still barely holding his position against Charles and Beaulieu. With the centre stable, Jourdan ordered Hatry’s division to the flank. Reinforced, Lefebvre repelled Charles’s column and advanced upon Lambusart, retaking it from Beaulieu. By evening, with no sign of a decisive outcome, Coburg withdrew his army, having suffered heavily.

 

Jourdan nearly lost at Fleurus. If Coburg had been his equal in numbers, it is likely the result would have been different. As it was, Coburg’s concentric attack by columns did not permit him to control the battle adequately, let alone coordinate his forces with those of the Prince of Orange. Jourdan’s victory can be attributed to the impressive skill of his divisional generals and their ability to manipulate their divisions and brigades on the battlefield in quick order when faced with rapidly changing situations. Jourdan’s position in the centre allowed him to feed Hatry and the Cavalry Reserve under Dubois to support Championnet and Lefebvre, preventing the Allies from breaking those divisions. Coburg’s column commanders, however, had no larger organization than the battalion, severely restricting their ability to react to circumstances.

The Naval Brigade at Modder River and Magersfontein Battles

Battle of Modder River (or Twee Riviere)

28 November 1899

After Lord Methuen’s rather expensive success at Graspan on 25 November, it appeared that the next obstacle on the way to the relief of Kimberley would be the kopjes at Spytfontein and Magersfontein. It must have been a surprise to the British when the station master at Modder River sent the news that the Boers had blown up the bridge and were in occupation. However, Methuen was reassured by the possession of a map of that area drawn from memory by Captain W. A. J. O’Meara, R.E. When the Guards Brigade and the 9th Brigade advanced across the flat ground south of the river, they were suddenly enveloped in rifle fire from trenches dug on the southern bank. They were pinned down in the open and the Guards attempted a right flanking movement, only to find the Riet River running south alongside their position. It was not until a crossing place was found on the left, late in the day, that the British made progress. The next day dawned to reveal empty Boer positions, but the battle had been very costly.

The map prepared by Captain O’Meara was based on no more than a visit to the site. In the months before the war he had been expressly ordered not to raise tensions by carrying out formal surveys with instruments. The map is entitled Sketch of Modder River Railway Bridge and is annotated in some detail. The date reads 19 October 1899 and as Kimberley was invested on 14 October, the document must have been smuggled out of the town. By the time Methuen made use of it, two months’ rains had invalidated the comments on how fordable the river was and possibly on the amount of cover available. In this case it was not the lack of a map that undermined the British plan, it was having a map that, because its limitations were not understood, misled the commander when the crisis struck.

The crisis itself was caused by a change to Boer tactics instigated by Vecht-general Joos De la Rey. Having observed the effectiveness of the flat trajectory of high velocity rifle fire at Graspan, he persuaded his comrades to dig trenches on the south bank of the Riet River and to stay quiet in them until the British were well in range. As a result the rifle fire from Mausers with a point-blank range of 437 yards (400m), and thus a long dangerous zone at 800 yards, was devastating. It is also said, perhaps unkindly, that having the river behind them encouraged the Boers to stay put rather than to try to retreat on their own initiative.

At about 4.30 a.m. that Tuesday morning the British advanced on either side of the railway with Major-general R. Pole-Carew’s 9th Brigade (1st Loyal North Lancashires, 2nd King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and 1st Northumberland Fusiliers) on the left and Major-general Sir Henry Colvile’s Guards Brigade (2nd Cold-stream, 3rd Grenadiers and 1st Scots) on the right. The 9th had the 1st Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in reserve and the Guards 1st Coldstream. As they went forward Methuen remarked to Colvile that the Boers appeared to have gone.

When they were within 1,000 yards (910m) the Boers opened fire. The British were pinned down in the open for most of the day. Most of them could not even see the Boers. The kilted Highlanders had the backs of their legs badly burned by the sun. On the left, where they were located in a farm south of the river, the Orange Free Staters were attacked by the Argylls and their line started to crumble, allowing the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry to take the farm and cross the river to Rosmead (now Ritchie). On this flank General Marthinus Prinsloo was unsupported by artillery and as darkness fell the vulnerability of their position, with the British coming over on the west, led to the withdrawal of the entire force during the night. Methuen had been wounded earlier in the day and Colvile assumed command, ordering the positions at nightfall to be held and the battle to continue the following day. When day dawned the Boer positions were empty. The victory had cost the British dear – with seventy dead and 413 wounded – while the Boers had also suffered seriously with about fifty killed and many wounded.

Battle of Magersfontein,

11 December 1899

The defeat of British Lieutenant-general Lord Methuen’s forces at Magersfontein prevented the raising of the siege of Kimberley and was one of three defeats, the others being the battles of Colenso and Stormberg, that earned this period the name of “Black Week”. The battle was a notable example of the British failure, at this stage of the war, to adapt to modern warfare, but even so was a much less easy victory for the Boers than many suppose. The resulting furore in the British newspapers led to the replacement of Sir Redvers Buller as Commander-in-Chief by Lord Roberts. The battle was also an outstanding demonstration of the effectiveness of high-velocity rifle fire at point-blank range, to the satisfaction of the Boers and the desolation of the British.

After successful, though unexpectedly costly, actions at Belmont (23 November), Graspan (25 November) and the Modder River (28 November 1899), Methuen had only to overcome the Boer forces under Assistant Commandant-general Piet Cronjé to achieve the relief of Kimberley. Some 25km (15 miles) south of that town a ragged line of hills runs across the route from Modder River Station and these were held by the Boers. On 29 November the Boers held a council of war. Their first inclination was to take up positions on the heights at Spytfontein, closer to Kimberley, but it was argued that there they would be exposed to observation and fire from Magersfontein. It is reported that there was a disagreement between De la Rey and Cronjé on this, and that President Steyn tipped the balance in favour of the former at a further council of war on 4 December. In any case the Boers moved to the Magersfontein line later that day. The hills known as the Magersfontein kopjes lie to the east of the railway and to the north-west on the other side of the track they extend and curve west. The railway itself is thus overlooked by substantial hills. To the east of Magersfontein, running almost due south, a ridge slopes gently to the Modder River at Moss Drift (marked as Voetpads Drift on the map later made by the British). The Boer defences depended on these features, and the trenches below them. The road to Kimberley passed, at that time, round the eastern end of the Magersfontein kopje. The British approach was over ground that was almost level. Indeed, the post-battle British map does not even show what are now known as Horse Artillery Hill and Headquarters Hill and a visitor to the site has to have them pointed out. They are the merest hummocks but are, nonetheless, sufficient to conceal troops from observation from the trenches, though less satisfactory if the observer is on the hilltop.

To get within attacking distance unscathed over ground more open than it is today meant a night approach over country that had not been mapped in detail nor reconnoitred thoroughly, although this task could have been carried out before 4 December when Cronjé moved south from the Spytfontein position. Indeed, British patrols actually rode over the Magersfontein kopjes before then; until that day they were there for the taking.

The British were reluctant to take action as they had fought three battles in the space of a week and the medical officers said they needed rest. In addition, Methuen was recovering from the wound he had received at the Modder River, a replacement for the blown railway bridge over the Modder was being built, reinforcements were awaited and various other reasons for a respite could be found. It is, however, clear that the failure to maintain the advance was responsible for what followed.

By 10 December Methuen had some 12,000 men, a 4.7-inch naval gun, six 5-inch howitzers and eighteen 15-pounder and six 12-pounder field guns. There were also four naval 12-pounders to guard his camp. To his left was a desert and to his right the Boers held sufficient territory to prevent a successful flanking movement, reducing the choices to the road or the railway. Methuen chose the hills between them in order to be able to use the road, the most direct route and one on which he could concentrate his forces. With the information available to Methuen, this must have seemed a sound decision, but it was made without knowledge of the Boer defensive positions. The attacking force was in three columns. On the right, ready to undertake the principal attack, was the Highland Brigade under Major-general Andrew Wauchope. The Brigade consisted of, in the order of march, 2nd Black Watch, 2nd Seaforth Highlanders, 1st Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the 1st Highland Light Infantry. All the field artillery and the howitzers were with Wauchope, as were the 9th Lancers and, to guard the south-eastern flank, were the 2nd King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. On the left was Major-general R. Pole-Carew’s force consisting of 9th Brigade and the Naval Brigade (1st Northumberland Fusiliers, 2nd Northamptonshires, Rimington’s Guides and the 4.7-inch naval gun) to make a demonstration against the Boer right. In reserve was Major-general Sir Henry Colvile with the Guards Brigade (1st and 2nd Coldstream Guards, 3rd Grenadier Guards and 1st Scots Guards), 12th Lancers and No. 7 Field Company Royal Engineers. The rest of the force was guarding the Modder River camp, except for the Gordon Highlanders who were to bring up supplies in the wake of the Highland Brigade.

Awaiting their approach were some 8,500 Boers with, probably, five 75mm Krupp guns, of which three faced south-west from the Magersfontein feature, and five Pom-Poms. The trenches at the foot of the Magersfontein kopje were held by men of the Kroonstad and Hoopstad Commandos of Cronjé’s Orange Free State force and more of his men, of Kroonstad, Heilbron, Bethlehem, Ladybrand and Ficksburg, held the northern end of the ridge to the east with De le Rey’s Bloemhof, Lichtenburg and Wolmaranstad Commandos holding the line down to Moss Drift. Forward of the ridge in the north was the Scandinavian Corps, a small group of volunteers. The positions beyond the railway to the north-west were held by men under Commandant Andries Cronjé, brother of Piet.

On 10 December Methuen’s artillery bombarded what they took to be the Boer positions. The 4.7-inch gun, nicknamed Joe Chamberlain, was west of the railway and the rest of the artillery, with Wauchope, was to the east. For two hours they shelled the heights while the Boers remained safely, if apprehensively, in their trenches below. All secrecy of intention was now lost – the British were clearly planning to attack.

The Highland Brigade moved out at half-an-hour after midnight on 11 December. It was pouring with rain. They were guided by Major G. E. Benson, R.A., who had taken a compass bearing on the desired deployment point. In order to avoid getting lost, the men advanced in mass of quarter-columns. This meant that the 3,400 men, 30 companies, moved in a long column about 38 metres (40 yards) wide. The terrain was dotted with anthills which stood up like concrete posts, half as high as a man, and patches of scrub to trip and catch at weapons and kilts. There was no barbed wire but a single wire farm fence crossed their path. By 3 a.m. they were still short of their objective by half a mile or so (about 750m) and a little too far west, but the bulk of the hill could be seen as the rain ceased. Benson advised Wauchope to deploy his men at once, but the general preferred to press on and Benson left him to do so. Some 45 minutes later, and by now within 400 yards (370m) of the undetected trenches, Wauchope gave the order to deploy, but changed the original plan, telling the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders to take up a position right of the Black Watch in order to compensate for the navigational error. With A Company of the Black Watch in position and B Company in the act of deploying, at about 4 a.m., the Boers detected them and opened fire. Their bullets tore into the dense body of men. The Black Watch fixed bayonets and charged, but were stopped by the weight of fire. Wauchope immediately realised the fire on his right was lighter and ordered an extension of the line in that direction, towards the gap in the Boer line. As he did so he was killed. The man who received the order, Lieutenant-colonel Coode, was also killed. At least two parties of Highlanders attempted to attack the eastern face of the kopje, wiping out the Scandinavians in the process. The first was forced back by Boer fire and the second faced not only their enemies but also friendly fire from British artillery as they scaled the hill. These efforts, had they succeeded, would certainly have led to a Boer defeat. By 8 a.m. the Highlanders were pinned down, sheltered only by fire from the British artillery which, at last, had seen the Boer trenches. Outstanding work was done by G Battery, Royal Horse Artillery which came into action from Horse Artillery Hill and, finding the recoil pushed them back down the slope, had the good sense to stay there and shell the Boers while sheltered from their rifle fire.

The Guards Brigade were engaging the Boers on the ridge to the east and, as the day wore on, played a key part in protecting the guns at Horse Artillery Hill and in resisting added pressure from Andries Cronjé’s Potchefstroom burghers, who had been moved to plug the gap east of the kopje. At about 7 a.m. the Gordon Highlanders were ordered up against Magersfontein kopje and by 11 a.m. they too were pinned down, short of the objective. At noon the Boers started to outflank the right of the Seaforths and the adjustment of the latter’s position to meet the threat was interpreted by others as the start of a British withdrawal, though how they thought they could do that under fire is hard to understand. As they started to move back Boer fire intensified, the movement quickened and soon became a flight. The British had endured hours under a roasting sun and under Boer fire and could do no more. The Boers made no attempt to exploit the opportunity and the Scots Guards plugged the gap in the face of the second concentrated Boer artillery fire of the day, the first having been Major Albrecht’s bombardment of Moss Drift to prevent a flanking movement by the British. As evening approached some Boers shouted to the Highlanders that the wounded were free to go, which they did, without further harm.

The next day the Boers were still there, as were the British guns and their protecting troops. Cronjé proposed a truce to collect the wounded and bury the dead which lasted until noon, when the last of the British withdrew. Methuen’s force had suffered some 239 men killed, of whom 202 were Highlanders, 663 wounded (including 496 Highlanders) and 75 taken prisoner. On the Boer side, the best estimates suggest 87 killed, 149 wounded and 18 taken prisoner. The British settled in on the Modder and the Boers set about enhancing their positions at Magersfontein. They were to stay there until, fearing envelopment by Lord Roberts’s army in February 1900, they moved east towards Paardeberg.

Reference:

Baker, Anthony, Battles and Battlefields of the Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 (Milton Keynes, The Military Press, 1999); Carver, Michael, The NAM Book of the Boer War (London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1999); Duxbury, G. R., The Battle of Magersfontein (Kimberley, McGregor Museum, 1997); Marix Evans, Martin, The Boer War, South Africa 1899–1902 (Oxford, Osprey Publishing, 1999). Jones, Huw M. and Meurig G. M. Jones, A Gazetteer of the Second Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 (Milton Keynes, The Military Press, 1999); Pakenham, Thomas, The Boer War (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979; Abacus, 1992).

Sonderverband 288

General Ulrich Kleemann of German 90th Light Africa Division speaking to a photographer aboard his SdKfz. 250 half-track command vehicle, 1942-1943; note StuG III in background

 

Special Unit 288

 

The Sonderverband 288 was raised on July 1st, 1941 at Potsdam (near Berlin). It was composed of units from all over Germany.

 

Special Unit 288 or z.b.V.288, was also known as Combat Group Menton, after its commander. It originally contained crack units from all branches of the German army: anti-tank men, Alpine troops, engineers, and eventually 3 of the new StuG.III assault guns. There was also a company of Brandenburgers, trained for special operations behind enemy lines.

 

These units were intended to prepare the way for the DAK as it flowed across the Nile and into the Middle East and on to India. Their most important component was a group of interpreters with their own printing presses. These men knew all the languages that would be needed, from Arabic and Persian dialects to Hindi, Urdi and Sanskrit. There was also a specialized group who had been trained to seize and rebuild the oil fields of the region.

 

When it became obvious that Rommel’s rush to the Nile was not going to be a cake walk, the 288th minus its interpreters and technicians was sent to Africa as special reinforcements. During the Gazala Line battles the 288th saw action supporting the Italian Ariete against the French forces defending Bir Hacheim at the southern tip of the British defenses. They also participated in the El Alamein battles, and the last of their StuG.IIIs was left behind for the British to contemplate.

 

By October 31 the Sonderverband 288 was reorganized and renamed Panzer-Grenadier-Regiment Afrika.

They were the first unit to be issued & try out the new StuG assault gun during the attack on Bir Hachim on the Alamain line.

 

As they were made up of virtually any and every unit in both the Heer, Luftwaffe with a few Kriegsmarine personnel.

 

Originally there were 2 Sonderverband units, 278 and 288.

 

 

Sonderverband 278 never made it to Afrika, but went to the Russian front instead.

 

Sonderverband 287/288

Sonderverband 287:
Aufgestellt 4.8.1942 aus dem Sonderstab”F” (Felmy), der ursprünglich für einen Einsatz im Irak vorgesehen war. Der Sd.Verb. 287 erscheint auch als Deutsch-Arabische Legion oder Wüsten-Sonderverband. Aufgabe war der Einsatz in der Nordafrikanischen Wüste zu Sonderunternehmungen im Rücken der allierten Front, aber auch zum Flankenschutz des DAK im Süden. In diesem Verband diente ein Reihe von arabischen Freiwilligen. 22.10.1942 vestärkt durch II. Btl (7. u. 8. Kp); III. Btl (9. – 12. Kp). III. Btl und Masse der anderen Einheiten kapitulieren Mai 1943 in Tunis.
Stab, I. u. II. Einsatz in Südrußland, werden am 2.5.1943 umbenannt in Stab, I., II./PzGrenRgt 92.

Der Sonderverband 288 wurde ab Juni 1941 in Potsdam aufgestellt. Aufgabe diese Verbandes sollte der Vorstoß zum Suezkanal und dessen Besetzung bis zum Eintreffen deutscher Truppen oder die Zerstörung und Ausschaltung als Transportweg sein. Als mögliche Routen für den Anmarsch waren geplant:
- durch die nordafrikanische Wüste von Libyen aus
- nach dem Einmarsch in Rußland und Eroberung des Kaukasus durch Persien, den Irak und Palästina hindurch.
Zum vorgesehenen Einsatz am Suezkanal kam es nie. Mit dem Befehl Ia 5910/42 der Panzerarmee wurde der Sonderverband ab dem 28. August 1942 in Panzer-Grenadier-Regiment Afrika umbenannt, welcher jedoch erst am 31. Oktober 1942 durchgeführt wurde.

Gliederung: Gliederung Sonderverband 287 August 1942 (alles mot.):
-Stabs-Kompanie
-Panzer-Späh-kompanie
-leichte Pionerkompanie 287
-Nachrichtenabteilung 287 (2 Kompanien)
-(Pz-)Gren.Btl 287 (4 Kompanien) – später I. Btl Sd.Verb. 287
-Werfer-Batterie 287
-Sturmgeschütz-Bttr. 287
-Nachschub-Führer 287 mit Versorgungseinheiten 287 (Transportkolonnen, Werkstattzug, Nachschubkompanie)
-Sanitätskompanie (gekürzt).

Der Sonderverband 288 bestand ursprünglich aus (alles mot.):
- Stab und Stabskompanie
- Aufklärungszug mit Panzer-Spähtrupp
- 1. Kompanie vom Lehr-Regiment z.b.V. 800 der Abwehr (Rgt Brandenburg)
- 2. Kompanie Gebirgsjäger-Kp (aus Wehrkreis VII)
- 3. Kompanie Schützen-Kompanie (aus Wehrkreis XI)
- 4. Kompanie MG-Kompanie (aus Wehrkreis IV)
- 5. Kompanie Panzerjäger-Kompanie (aus Wehrkreis VI), dazu ein Sturmgeschützzug (aus Wehrkreis XIII)
- 6. Kompanie Fla-Kp (aus Wehrkreis VI)
- 7. Kompanie Pionierkompanie (aus Wehrkreis XI)
- Nachrichtenkompanie (aus Wehrkreis IV)
- kleine Spezialtrupps wie Sanitätskräfte mit Kenntnissen in der Tropenmedizin; Dolmetschertrupp mit 20 Arabern, Öl- und Wassersuchtrupps, Geologen
9./Flak-Abteilung 25

Kommandeure: Sonderverband 288: Oberst Menton

Kämpfe/Aufträge: Während des Feldzuges in Afrika meistens im Rahmen der 90. leichten Division eingesetzt.

A series of tribes (900s B.C.–A.D. 300s)

Early Scythian

Late Scythian

Sarmatian

 

The most complex contributor to the pattern of Asian civilization lies in the regions where east met west through the expansion of the Greek and Persian Empires and the intrusion of Sakas or Scythians, Kushans, and Hephthalite Huns. This region, centering on modern Afghanistan, northern Pakistan, and the basins of the Syr Dar’ya and Amu Dar’ya Rivers, is one of the most interesting areas, because of the variety of peoples, religions, languages, and cultures that came and went, each contributing and at the same time adapting to the ways of other societies.

Hellenistic influence originating from the campaigns of Alexander the Great continued with the foundation of non- Greek states. Thus the Scythians, or Sakas, who conquered the Bactrian states in the late second century B.C.E., adopted many Greek traditions, including coinage with Greek script, Greek titles, and Greek methods of city planning. This pattern became even more pronounced when the Parthians succeeded the Scythians as rulers of the upper Indus and its tributaries. Hellenistic influence was still to be found under the Kushans, not least in the architectural features of their city at SURKH-KOTAL in Afghanistan. The most enduring Greek influence in the region, however, was the GANDHARA school of art founded in modern Pakistan. While drawing on Buddhism for its themes, Gandharan art owed a deep artistic debt to Greek sculptural traditions.

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In ancient times, the Ukraine was inhabited in turn by the Cimmerians (sih-MARE-ee-unz), Scythians (SITH-ee-unz), and Sarmatians (sar-MAY-shunz). The Caucasus was controlled first by the Urartians (oo-RAR-shunz) and later by the Armenians. Other notable civilizations of the area, primarily in what is now Georgia, included Colchis (KOHL-kis) and Iberia (ie- BEER-ee-uh—not to be confused with the Iberian Peninsula, where Spain and Portugal are located.)

 

The Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians were nomadic groups who originated deep in Central Asia and moved westward beginning in about 1000 B.C. First came the Cimmerians, who drove out the Trypilians (tri-PEEL-ee-unz), a group who had settled in the Ukraine as early as 6000 B.C. The Cimmerians occupied the region until they, too, were driven out, by the Scythians in the 700s B.C. They spread out to Asia Minor and Assyria, where they posed a threat for many years, and in about 600 B.C. took part in the destruction of Urartu.

 

People in the civilized countries of Europe and Asia considered these groups of people barbarians, but the Scythians, while not truly civilized—that is, they did not possess great cities and did not produce any notable literature—did engage in commerce with the Greeks. They spread their influence through military expeditions, and at one point their lands extended as far as the Balkan (BAWL-kun) Mountains in southeastern Europe. They managed to ward off attacks by the Persians in 512 B.C. and the Greeks under Alexander the Great in about 325 B.C.

 

By about 300 B.C., however, the Scythians had been driven back to their adopted homeland in the Caucasus. They were eventually overtaken by the Sarmatians, a closely related group. The Sarmatians retained control over the area until about A.D. 200, and joined forces with Rome against the various Germanic (jur-MAN-ik) tribes swarming over Europe at that time. Eventually the Huns, who brought down the Roman Empire, would push the Sarmatians out of the region in the A.D. 300s.

Recollections from the Marshal Ivan Ivanovitsj Pstygo

MOSCOW (AFP) May 07, 2005

First WWII wound from June 1941 still fresh for Russian air force Marshal Ivan Pstygo rubs his scarred hands — memory of a first clash with the Nazis as a young lieutenant in the Moldovan sky on June 22, 1941, and the harrowing flight in his flame-engulfed plane 100- kilometers (62 miles) back to base.

 

Against a backdrop of model MiG fighter planes, his bronze bust and a portrait in the marshal’s uniform, the former airman recalled being thrown into a terrible war at the age of 26.

 

Speaking in the run up to 60th anniversary commemorations of the end of World War II, he also remembers the Soviet mythology of the war — and his own take on that official history.

 

“Of course our troops knew that a German attack was imminent,” he affirmed, challenging the widespread idea that the Germans’ “Barbarossa plan” had taken the Soviet Union by surprise.

 

“164 divisions amassed at the borders did not slip by unnoticed. Then there were those who fled to us. We had all the proofs,” he said, adding ruefully: “the problem was that we were not at all prepared.”

 

Pstygo had just graduated from air force school — “four years of study, I was lucky in that: most did not have more than a year of courses” — and was stationed in Katolsky, near Chisinau, to pilot a Sukhoi-2 bomber.

 

It was a plane he had never flown. The rest of his comrades were not much better prepared.

 

“Mixed divisions of Romanians and Germans approached. Our squadron attacked between two mountains,” he recalled, mimicking the attack angle of Soviet fighters and bombers, a total of 25.

 

“We have lost 19 planes in one mission… it was one of the hardest flights in my life,” he added as his voice sank.

 

Once back to the airdrome, the remaining six planes lifted off again.

 

“Two of my comrades fell before me, they were hit, the plane was on fire and I had to fly it for another 100 kilometers. My hands were burnt. Once landed, I looked at my partner — he was dead, with 11 bullets in his chest,” he remembered.

 

Ivan then went to report to the battalion’s commander, hunched over a map-laden table.

 

“Ivan, where did you come from? We’ve already buried you, he told me. Not buried in fact, of course. That was ‘missing in action,’ but in fact I had come back with 15 comrades,” he said with a smile.

 

Ivan fought in many battles thereafter: Kiev, Kharkiv, Stalingrad.

 

“They called us ‘horseless.’ We flew whatever was available. On the whole, we were just retreating,” he said.

 

As for the state of the Red Army in 1941, following a purge by Stalin, Marshal Pstygo — who earned his title in 1975 — minces no words.

 

“An army without a head, without officers: that’s what we’ve had,” he fumed in a booming commander’s voice. “Three marshals died in battle, but as many were killed before then by Stalin. Army generals? Two were killed, but 12 were shot before the war. Divisions were commanded by captains, organisation was pathetic, we were tripping over each other.”

 

In spring 1942, Soviet troops were surrounded at Kharkov in the eastern Ukraine, without food. “For three days they were kept alive by dry bread dropped over their heads.”

 

“I am not a revolutionary, but they told us lies at the headquarters. They gave numbers like 1,600 planes, but 90 percent of them were still at the factory,” he said before evoking the fate of officers sent to Gulag labor camps before the war.

 

“Two of my commanders were the ‘repressed’ who came out of the camp to fight. They were shattered men, they were broken in body, all over. But they had superior minds. We would have fought differently, lost fewer men, if we had them earlier,” he sighed.

 

Battles went on. Bryansk, the crossing of Dniepr, the Battle of Kursk — “a carnage with tanks piled three levels high.”

 

1943 had been “chancy”, but he had “loved 1944,” right until the victory.

 

Regrets?

 

“My comrades, my dead men… and that we did not march on, until the sea, to Spain. Americans had no business in Europe,” he said.

 

In a career of 42 years, he piloted 52 different types of planes and in the 1980s his last of all — a MiG-23 jet.

 

At Monday’s lavish May 9 World War II victory commemorations, he will be on the official tribune. Or at least he will if his heart permits him.

 

“They invited us, then they will push us aside,” he sighed.

Book Review: Panthéon de la Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War.

Mark Levitch. Panthéon de la Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. 224 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8262-1678-6.

Reviewed by Martha Hanna
Published on H-War (July, 2009)
Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine

A Pantheon Co-opted

In Panthéon de la Guerre Mark Levitch tells a fascinating tale of artistic vision, cultural politics, and Franco-American relations, and he tells it very well. He traces the intriguing, and often sad story of a patriotic work of art, conceived in 1914, completed in 1918, and then reconstructed after 1945 to mean something very different. The piece of art, as his title and subtitle suggest, was the Panthéon de la Guerre, a massive panorama of the Great War, imagined, executed (with considerable help from a retinue of artists and artisans), and introduced to the Parisian public by two elder statesmen of the French art establishment, Pierre Carrier-Belleuse (1851-1933) and Auguste-François Gorguet (1863-1927). The finished product was to be a permanent–and enormous–memorial to a nation in arms. Given the intended primary audience, and the patriotic ardor of the artists who executed the project, France’s contribution to the war–represented most poignantly by the carefully rendered portraits of countless fallen poilus–was to assume center stage.  And this is indeed how the Panthéon de la Guerre appeared when President Raymond Poincaré officially opened the panorama to public viewing in October 1918. Yet, this is not how the Panthéon appears now in its permanent home in Kansas City, Missouri. Rather, the Panthéon, much reduced in size and radically reconfigured, was reassembled at the height of the Cold War (under the guidance of a one-time doughboy and Missourian artist, Daniel MacMahon) to commemorate the idealistic vision of Woodrow Wilson, and to acclaim the central role the United States played in 1917 (and beyond) in defending the cause of freedom. How a work of French patriotic art became an icon of American political orthodoxy is central to the story Levitch traces with elegance, insight, and intelligence.

Too old to fight, Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet did what many of their generation did; they chose to contribute to the French war effort by deploying their particular talents to reinforce a message of patriotism. To this end, they created a massive visual tribute to the men (and occasional woman) of France who sacrificed themselves to the national cause; to the nation’s gallant allies, and to the statesmen of the Entente cause who supervised the war effort. The noncombatant mobilization of France’s cultural elite was a central element of the national war effort; writers and scholars devoted much of their intellectual energy to defining what was at stake in the war and why unwavering resolve was critical to the nation’s very survival. But artists could contribute to the war effort in a way that most writers could only envy; they could provide both a visual representation of the land ravaged by alien, barbaric invaders, and a moving tribute to the men-in-arms and their many international allies who fought to liberate France from the enemy’s merciless grip. This, at least, is how Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet imagined their artistic enterprise. The Panthéon de la Guerre would be a work of art of unprecedented scope: “Measuring an astounding 402 feet in circumference by 45 feet high, the Panthéon contained about five thousand full-length portraits … [its] largest section and principal focus was a Parthenon-like ‘temple of glory’ dedicated to French heroes … animated portraits of about four thousand figures, mostly bemedaled soldiers, many of whom had been killed.” (pp. 5-8). If the “temple of glory” constituted a memorial to some of the 1.4 million French men who died in the war, the rest of the panorama celebrated the multinational alliance that fought on the side of France. The Serbs and Montenegrans, Portuguese and Italians, British, Russians, and Americans: all were given space on this paean to the power of international cooperation. Indeed, as the war lasted longer than anyone had anticipated in 1914, new political alliances and revolutionary upheavals forced the artists to modify their original vision. By 1917, Russia was no longer the secure French ally it had been at the outbreak of war; and if Russia’s role, muddied by the Bolshevik Revolution (sinisterly portrayed and with explicit anti-Semitic inflections in the final vision), could no longer be represented as that of a  steadfast ally, then America’s entry into the war was both cause for celebration and occasion for artistic improvisation. Woodrow Wilson, his wartime confidant, Colonel House, and other prominent Americans had to be inserted into a work of art that was ,and would remain for the next seventy years or more, always subject to revision.

When the Panthéon opened in October 1918, it was housed in a custom-built site large enough to contain the enormous circular structure, and situated in the very shadow of the Invalides. To recoup their costs–this was, after all, a commercial venture as much as an avowal of patriotism–the artists charged admission to all but uniformed soldiers. This did not deter the crowds who flocked in the immediate aftermath of the war to the site; indeed, more than eight million visitors marveled at the display while it was in Paris. Some went to see memorialized the son or husband whose portrait could be discerned on the staircase of heroes. Levitch notes that “the Pantheon’s portraits … not only contested the war’s facelessness but also offered consolation–private and public–by refusing to treat the war’s losses as a mass death…. By making portraiture the touchstone of the entire work, the artists, on an unsurpassed scale, privileged the human face and individual expression as a form of resistance to the anonymity of modern war” (p. 72). Grieving civilians were not the only ones to seek solace or inspiration in this unusual work of art. Many who went to see the panorama were soldiers recently released from the trenches, awaiting passage home to Australia, or America, or, no doubt, Angoulême, Arras, or Arles. Whether French or foreign, these soldiers were (as far as we can tell) ardent admirers of the work of art that rendered homage to their collective efforts. One Australian soldier enthused: “A book could not describe it–the sentiment, the glory and the art it contains” (p. 84).

By the mid-twenties, however, public interest in the Panthéon was well near spent, and it was no longer a reliably profitable venture. Perhaps its money-making potential could be best exploited if it were to travel abroad, finding new audiences (with well-lined pockets and a taste for patriotic bombast) across the Atlantic. And thus it was that the Panthéon was dismantled and shipped to the United States in 1927, in a crate so huge as to warrant wondrous headlines in its own right. Not since the transportation of the Statue of Liberty had the French sent America such a vast, and popularly heralded piece of public art. Yet American audiences were not as enthusiastic as the Panthéon’s new owners had calculated. From 1927 until 1940, the panorama traveled a circuit, like a once-famous lounge singer in search of increasingly elusive applause, from New York to Washington, Cleveland, Chicago, and San Francisco. A proud and dignified work of patriotic commemoration thus became a spectacle that could lure audiences only with the accouterments of vaudevillian entertainment. When the Panthéon was displayed at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933-34, the ticket-buying public was enticed by the promise that for the price of admission they could also wander through a facsimile of a devastated French village, see the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand traveled on his fateful day in Sarajevo, and marvel at remnants of the Red Baron’s famous tri-plane. By the time the exhibit closed in San Francisco in 1940, American audiences were as weary of the Panthéon de la Guerre, and its increasingly irrelevant fascination with an old war as the French had been more than a decade earlier.

Gathering dust in a storage locker in Baltimore, threatened by decay, neglect, and imminent destruction when the financially troubled owners of what was by 1952 an enormous artistic white-elephant could no longer make their payments, the Panthéon was rescued by the entrepreneurial vision of Daniel MacMahon, who imagined that the panorama could be restored to patriotic service as decoration for one still-unadorned wall in the Memory Hall of the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City. Reconstituted in its new site, however, the Panthéon would be only one-sixteenth its original size and fundamentally reconfigured. In America’s memorial to the Great War, it is not surprising that the American contribution to the war, of peripheral interest to Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet, became the mural’s central focus, and France’s valiant poilus and the visual rendering of the western front that had been a much-admired feature of the original artwork were either reduced in significance or ignored entirely. Moreover, the participation of leading Democrats in the war was particularly noted when the panorama was installed in Harry Truman’s home state. In keeping with a practice that dated to the war years, and continued into the 1920s, MacMahon did not hesitate to cover over some of the original portraits in order to insert likenesses of political heroes of the day. Both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Truman, rendered in their youthful incarnations as doughboys, joined Woodrow Wilson and other Democratic luminaries in the mural in Memory Hall. Remnants of the original painting that could not be used were either consigned to the dustbin of history or, in later years, that cyberspace emporium of the odd and the idiosyncratic, E-Bay, where a fragment of the work sold for the modest sum of $99.

As an art historian, Levitch is appropriately attentive to the aesthetic characteristics of the Panthéon. He shows how the style of artistic representation evolved with the war itself; thus soldiers whose portraits were recorded in October 1914 were rendered in pastels, with none of the lines and rough-hewn edges that would come to convey the weariness of soldiers who witnessed the interminable horrors of trench warfare. But, Levitch is not interested only in the formal qualities of the Panthéon. Indeed, his interpretation is more rightly understood as an exercise in careful cultural analysis, informed by, but not limited to, the artistic dimension of his subject.  He notes, for example, both the neoclassical and inherently conservative character of the artwork as created during the war years. Winged Victory acclaimed the poilus’ sacrifice. The  visual practice of panorama, much more associated with the nineteenth century than with the twentieth, reduced the chaos and incoherence of the war by offering reassurance that everything could  be contained and ordered in one sweeping visual display, and the heroic individual occupied pride of place in a vista that ignored entirely such essentially modern military innovations as tanks, airplanes, and poison gas. Furthermore, like the most conservative commentators of their day, the French artists either refused to recognize the genuine contributions of French socialists to the war effort (Henri Barbusse was not, for example, represented on the stairway of heroes) or portrayed those men of the Left who could not be ignored–the Bolsheviks, above all others–in crude and vicious anti-Semitic stereotype. Yet, for all its conservative intentions, the Panthéon acquired a modernist dimension despite itself. Levitch concludes his narrative of the mural’s troubled history with a reflection on the quintessentially modern fate of this overtly patriotic undertaking. Physically disassembled, reconstructed, and re-ordered to mean something its original authors could neither have imagined nor intended, the Panthéon de la Guerre constitutes not an immutable and eternal vision of the Great War, but positive proof of the plasticity of public art.

Levitch’s analysis is well grounded in the relevant scholarship, and is, in the main, very persuasive. That the Panthéon became in its sorry passage from Paris to the plains of Missouri a symbol not of French valor and national resolve, but an expression of Cold-War American  triumphalism is compellingly argued. I would, however, take issue with his argument that by the mid-1920s the French lost interest in the extraordinary panorama, and the tale it told of collective, heroic resolve largely because the Panthéon offered a sanitized and exclusively civilian vision of the war that front-line soldiers rejected once they became capable of finding their own voice: “The Panthéon’s unreconstructed, home-front view of the war lost credibility as veterans started narrating their own experiences and increasingly played leading roles in the construction of the war’s memory” (p. 79). Without doubt, the work of art articulated–as did many of the essays, books, and public lectures produced by other distinguished civilians too old to fight–an interpretation of the war often identified as that of civilians alone, an interpretation that denounced the barbarism of the enemy, and consecrated the heroism of the poilu. But it is by no means clear that during, and immediately after the war this “civilian” vision was one that front-line soldiers rejected out of hand, or deemed radically incompatible with their own attitudes towards the war. As Levitch demonstrates, front-line soldiers flocked to the site in 1918 and 1919, embraced its representation of their experience, and applauded its respect for their collective sacrifice. And they did so, I would argue, because the message the Panthéon presented–conservative, heroic, and in many ways defiantly anti-modern–was not fundamentally at odds with how French soldiers understood the war while they were fighting it. Indeed, in their wartime correspondence and trench newspapers, they made much the same point. The enemy was, they were convinced, a threat to French civilization, and the poilu was deserving of civilian respect.

That French soldiers came to embrace a more explicitly tragic and more jaundiced view of the war during the mid-to-late 1920s–a view that questioned whether the war had been a cause worth fighting for; a view that obscured their own wartime consent–was not a function of their ability at last to find their own voice. Whatever might have been the case in Britain and Germany, French soldiers did not wait until the late 1920s to narrate their own experiences of the war. They had been busy doing so from almost the first day of the war; every day, in letters, trench journals, and trench newspapers, they wrote honestly, passionately, and at great length about the horrific nature of the war, and the necessity of French victory. What changed in the 1920s was how French veterans re-imagined their own war experiences. As Leonard V. Smith has recently argued (and, in fact, so recently as to make his argument unavailable to Levitch) in The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (2007) French veterans–or, at least, those who wrote about the war a decade after its conclusion–did come, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, to represent the Great War as tragedy. But this interpretation was not one that would have made sense to French soldiers during the conflict or immediately after the Armistice. I suspect that the Panthéon de la Guerre lost its ability to draw paying French crowds not because it offered a naive, even insulting civilian interpretation of the war. Rather, it represented a vision of the war that French soldiers and civilians alike had once shared, but that a decade later seemed hopelessly dated, and more than a little embarrassing. It was high time to ship this relic of another age to a distant land. And, the story that Mark Levitch reconstructs of that passage, and all that it can tell us about art, the commercialization of war culture, and the arc of international politics in the twentieth century is one well worth reading.

Book Review: Soldiers’ Lives through History: The Middle Ages.

Clifford J. Rogers. Soldiers’ Lives through History: The Middle Ages. Portsmouth: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007. 336 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-313-33350-7.

Reviewed by Christopher A. Candy (Department of History, Texas Tech University)
Published on H-HRE (July, 2009)
Commissioned by Tryntje Helfferich

Medieval Soldiers’ Lives

This book is part of a larger five-volume series printed by Greenwood Press and edited by Dennis Showalter. The stated aim of the series is to “address comprehensively the cutting-edge experiences of the Western soldier from his initial appearance … to his latest avatars” (p. xii). This work, the second entry in the series, achieves this aim in admirable fashion in trying to describe the lives of European “soldiers” during the period from 476 to 1453.

Clifford Rogers has already written and edited several well-received books on military history, particularly his War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327-1360 (2000) and The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (1995). Soldiers’ Lives is a much broader work than his previous material, meant to provide a generalized picture of the experience of war from the individual’s view and over the broad sweep of medieval Europe. As the author himself notes in his preface, to do so is practically impossible due to the wide differences in place and time. Rogers’s approach is therefore to identify the attributes of medieval soldiering that cross these boundaries and are unique, both compared to the warfare of the Greeks and Romans that preceded it and to the world of gunpowder that would follow. Having set that challenge from the beginning, Rogers then proceeds to define carefully what is possible given the available evidence and material. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the material comes from western Europe after the eleventh century, though he has gone to great lengths to find material from outside this familiar ground where it exists.  Rogers’s introduction then continues this process of defining his subject by tackling the question of what a “soldier” is in the medieval context: an individual who soldiers as an activity among other activities, rather than fitting into the modern concept of a full-time, exclusive professional distinct from the civilians that surround him. Because the chapters are not organized chronologically, in the rest of the introduction Rogers then briefly describes the different time periods from the fall of Rome to the fall of Constantinople to frame his later thematic approach.

The first chapter places the medieval soldier into the context of the society from which he came. Rogers systematically defines what shaped the lives of “those who fight” before conflict ever occurred–the activities that gave them their skills, the roles they played as landowners and aristocrats, and the service they gave in garrisons and in the households of other rulers and lords. He then completes this picture by showing how participation in military activity was not limited to the aristocracy, but also encompassed the militia service of townsmen and peasants, the familiarity of churchmen with war, and even the regular participation (when necessary) of women in conflict. The convincing impression is of a society that was militarized at all levels and across the social spectrum.

Having defined the medieval soldier and his relationship to his society, Rogers then moves forward to address the soldier’s experience during wartime. This is broken down into specific chapters, each one addressing a specific wartime experience–mustering, marching, siege, battle, raiding, and the aftermath of war. Though these categories are familiar ones from most histories of medieval warfare, Rogers again focuses on the experience of the soldier, not the society as a whole. As a result, certain topics are addressed briefly compared to their recent treatment by other authors, such as John France and Michael Prestwich. For example, logistics, a centerpiece in many recent works, is addressed only in piecemeal fashion.

The conclusion of Soldiers’ Lives works to bring together each of the topics covered in the previous chapters by using the life of the fourteenth-century English knight, Sir Thomas Gray of Heton, to show how all of the threads Rogers has explored previously intertwine in a single career. Drawing heavily upon Andy King’s recent translation of the Scalacronica, Rogers lays out Gray’s life in brief to provide concrete examples of how warriors of the time dealt with each of these issues.[1] Rogers concludes by reemphasizing the point that, due to the wide sweep of history, the impressions of the individual’s role in warfare (as conveyed by such evidence as Gray’s life) are far more useful and accurate than any numerical analysis could be.

Indeed, the most notable feature of this work is the extensive, voluminous presentation of evidence to buttress the impressions of the individual experience of the medieval soldier. Rogers goes to great lengths to bring in material outside of the familiar English and French sources, especially from eastern and southern Europe. Each chapter has extensive endnotes which contain information both on the primary sources for the material covered and on the academic debates regarding them. The capstone of this work is also the bibliography and its collection of suggestions for further reading. Broken down into both chronological and thematic sections, this resource provides a concise list of materials for any student of the military history of this time to peruse–and suggests a few to leave behind.

While Rogers addresses larger issues of armies or nations, they are not the focus of this work–a point that the author makes very clear in his preface.  While most histories of this type use chronicles, archival materials, and governmental records to examine warfare from the viewpoint of societies, armies, or nations as a whole, Rogers uses the same materials to focus on the individual and his particular experience of conflict. In many ways, this is a social history of the experience of one part of medieval society–the soldier–rather than any sort of operational, procedural, or organizational military history. Within these limits, however, Rogers should be complimented for the depth and concision with which he has explored this subject. This book is an excellent complement to major general works on medieval military history, such as those by Philippe Contamine or Michael Prestwich, and should be a required addition to any collection of texts on medieval military history.

Note

[1]. Thomas Gray, Scalacronica, 1272-1363, ed. and trans. Andy King (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2005).