About the only change made was a gradual "thinning out" of the troop density, which judging by the casualty returns of 1914-1918 didn't help very much. And this despite the large numbers of guns employed by both sides in that conflict.Įuropean infantry were still fighting in dense lines even in the Great War although the British improvised better tactics during the Boer War, it appears they forgot the lesson by 1914. In fact, IIRC, only in the American Civil War did the infantry briefly gain the ascendency, in that most wounds were caused by musketry, not artillery.
The infantry may be the Queen of Battles, but it was still artillery that caused most of the casualties in the Napoleonic period, hence Nappy's tactic of concentrating a grand battery to pummel the enemy at the point of attack. It is estimated that 400,000 Filipinos starved to death.sad stuff The third use that comes to mind was when the United States of America used them in conjunction with farm burning to crush the Filipino independance movement after the end of the Spanish-American war. The second use I can think of was when Great Britain used them in conjunction with farm burning to subdue the Boers. The first use of them I can think of was Valeriano Wyler's concentration camp and farm burning campaign to crush the Cuban revolt against Spain in the 1890s. Along with trench warfare, concentration camps became an established way of warfare in the same timeframe. The first major European experience with trench warfare was in the Boer Wars. the rifles were still mostly muzzle loaders, and the still relatively slow rate of fire meant the the order of organization was still in dense formations. the rifled muskets and expanding projectiles meant that infantry firepower was much deadlier and B. The fighting in the American civil war was particularly viscious because A. Somehow, the Napoleonic era always seemed to be a time of confusion, when they still hadn't figured out what to do with the new gunpowder weapons, but the earlier weapons had already become obsolete. I'm not sure when European armies started to fight from cover, abandoning the millenia-old tradition of multiple ranks packed tightly together in the open, using formations designed for mutual protection against sword or spear equipped enemies. It wasn't until late in the American Civil War that US troops began to make use of improved cover and trenches as standard procedure. The muskets of the day weren't able to hit a man-sized target reliably at 100 meters, but they were shooting at a much larger target, the entire formation of enemy troops. Skirmisher units sometimes went forward with two or three loaded rifles per man, discharged them at the enemy, and then fell back out of effective gun range to reload. Worse, most of the rifles were still muzzle loaded, which required driving the projectile down the barrel through the rifling.
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