There was then, and had been, a general form
of Roman battle array that has been preserved
among armies of Europe to the present time.
It was a drawing up of troops in three distinct
lines: a front line, to commence the action; a
second, not more than three hundred yards
behind it, to support the first; a third beyond
the range of battle, as the reserve, which the
general held in hand to let loose at a decisive
moment, and secure, if possible, the fortune of
the day. Many battles have been decided by
reserves, and victory is often with the general
who is last to bring his reserve into action.

Marius abolished the three lines of the Roman
army and divided it into cohorts, which gave to
his force some of the mobility of modern troops.

The artillery of old consisted of arrows, of
machines for firing great stones, or for forcing
enormous weights in battery against town walls.
Towns were defended by walls and towers with
an outside ditch, wet if possible. Besiegers
built movable towers to advance against them,
overtopping them that they might pour their
missiles down on the defenders, or level with
them that they might grapple, throw across
a wooden bridge, and pour their fighting men
over the ramparts. They made, by trenching,
their approaches to the besieged citadel, or they
tried escalade by ladders with main force, or
assaults and surprises upon weak points under
cover of the night. Walls also were sapped.
The place of the foundations removed, was
supplied with wooden beams, until enough space
had been undermined; fire was then put to the
wood, and the walls fell. While this was being
done, the defenders above, went fishing among
their assailants with huge cranes for fishing-
rods. After the wall had fallen, a defence of
camp works might perhaps be found within the
breach. Sieges were often long. As the Greeks
were ten years before Troy, so were the Romans
ten years before Veii.

Cæsar taught that a great general should seek
to conquer rather by diplomacy than by the
sword, and Roman precepts of war, added to a
Treatise on the Military Art composed in the
later days of the Roman Empire, contain such
ideas as these: Try to reduce your enemy by
want, by the terror of your arms, and by
surprises, rather than by regular battles, for they
are frequently decided by chance. The best
projects are those which are kept hidden from
the enemy. He who judges correctly of his own
strength and of that of the enemy, is rarely
beaten. Consult with several; decide with few
men, or alone.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the
foundations of the modern European states were
laid in the midst of ignorance and tumult. War
was not an art in the middle ages: or Charlemagne,
with all his resources, would not have
extended over thirty years his contest with the
Saxons. Charlemagne maintained his conquests,
defended his frontiers, and at the close of his
reign saw chivalry established. Whatever may
have been well represented by that institution,
war as an art was entirely put out of account by
it. Instead of combined movements skilfully
arranged, a battle was, again, what it had been
among the savages—a medley of duels; but it
was of duels between men not free to move as
the savage is, and as the good soldier ought to
be, but shut up in metal fortresses, oppressed by
their weight, and carried about heavily by horses
further weighted with metal casings of their
own. Knights in their armour had to be taken,
as castles are taken, by assault and breach. If
overthrown, however, they might lie helpless as
turtles on their backs, for any villain to chop
into with a hatchet. Froissart tells of a pope's
nephew who was taken prisoner and killed for
the sake of his shell of magnificent armour.
The medley fight of horsemen, of all forms
of battle, was the highest known to chivalry.
The infantry was represented only by a
confused rabble of unarmed serfs. Arrows and
swords were weak weapons against impenetrable
mail; the mace and hammer then became
weapons of war; and it was sought to bend or break
the casing, or to overthrow the knight by
sapping his foundations, killing his horse under
him. At Fuornova, the valets, seeing several
Italian men-at-arms unhorsed and prostrate,
used common hatchets to break upon the visors
of their helmets. Comines adds, "They were
very difficult to kill, so strong was their armour;
and we should not have been able to kill any of
them if there had not been several men to
assist."

Chivalry was, at last, blown up by gunpowder.
"It is a shame," said Bayard, of the arquebuse,
"that a brave man should be exposed to be
killed by a miserable fop." Montluc wished
that the arquebuse had never been invented by
the devil: "I should not bear the marks of it;
and many brave and valiant men would not have
been killed by poltroons, who shoot from a
distance those they would not dare to face in fair
combat."

It was among the Swiss, the people least
affected by the love of chivalry, that the use of
a regular infantry was restored in the fourteenth
century. The Swiss infantry were pikemen
whose efficiency soon became felt, and infantry
columns became an important section of an army
in the other lands of Europe: those in which
chivalry had weakest hold being the earliest in
their adoption. The English men-at-arms won
Crecy on foot, with help from the cannon (there
were four guns), then first brought into the field
by the English. At Poictiers and Agincourt,
again, our men-at-arms were made to fight on
foot. The value of an organised infantry seemed
instinctively to have been felt, and there was
skill shown in the choice of fighting ground.

In thirteen hundred and twenty-seven, about
twenty years before the battle of Crecy, the
first use of guns is said to have been made in
England, at the battle of Werewater. A hundred
years later, portable fire-arms were invented
by the Italians; but they were of course very
cumbrous; while the great guns were so heavy
and clumsy, that in Henry the Eighth's reign an
English ship, under the weight of her ordnance,