THE ART OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES 56

The Swiss and the Queen of Battle

5.20. The Swiss and the Queen of Battle

The improved artillery of the early sixteenth century worked even more havoc with the Confederates. Of all formations the phalanx is the easiest at which to aim, and the one which suffers most loss from each cannon ball which strikes it. A single shot ploughing through its serried ranks might disable twenty men, yet the Swiss persisted in rushing straight for the front of batteries and storming them in spite of their murderous fire. Such conduct might conceivably have been justifiable in the fifteenth century, when the clumsy guns of the day could seldom deliver more than a single discharge between the moment at which the enemy came within range and that at which he reached their muzzles.

Scientific artillerists, however, such as Pietro Navarro and Alphonso D’Este, made cannon a real power in battles by increasing its mobility and the rapidity of its fire. None the less the Confederates continued to employ the front attack, which had become four or five times more dangerous in the space of forty years. A fearful lesson as to the recklessness of such tactics was given them at Marignano, where, in spite of the gallantry of the French gendarmerie, it was the artillery which really won the day. The system which Francis’ advisers there employed was to deliver charge after charge of cavalry on the flanks of the Swiss columns, while the artillery played upon them from the front. The onsets of the cavalry, though they never succeeded in breaking the phalanx, forced it to halt and ‘form the hedgehog.’ The men at arms came on in bodies of about five hundred strong, one taking up the fight when the first had been beaten off. ‘

In this way more than thirty fine charges were delivered, and no one will in future be able to say that cavalry are of no more use than hares in armour,’ wrote the king to his mother. Of course these attacks would by themselves have been fruitless; it was the fact that they checked the advance of the Swiss, and obliged them to stand halted under artillery fire that settled the result of the battle. At last the columns had suffered so severely that they gave up the attempt to advance, and retired in good order, unbroken but diminished by a half in their size.

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