RENAISSANCE WARFARE
A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth- Century: By Sir Charles Oman. (Methuen. 3os.) SIR CHARLES OMAN must now be the doyen of historical scholarship in this country. From the beginning of his career as a historian he has been interested in the art and science of war. He has given us the standard history of mediaeval warfare, a great seven-volumed History of the Peninsular War, besides innumerable studies in the Napoleonic and other wars up and down the ages. Now he celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of his first writing on the subject, a prize-
essay on the art of war, and his new-found liberation from Parliament for historical research, with a full-length volume on the wars of the sixteenth century. _ It is a very fine achievement. The book is, as one would expect, a store-house of learning. While keeping strictly and concisely to his subject, Sir Charles illuminates it with comparisons which come easily to him, -looking forward and backward over the whole field of military history. For example, he compares the situation Charles VIII got himself into at Fornovo on his retreat from Naples in 1495 with Marshal Macdonald's similar predicament in 1799. He checks Machiavelli's military ideas from a knowledge of Roman warfare ; or, when describing Parma's brilliant night-retreat over the Seine in the campaign of 1592, usefully illustrates it by a comparison with the British withdrawal from Gallipoli in 1915.
But more, Sir. Charles' enthusiasm for his subject makes the book interesting reading. The whole section on the French Wars of Religion is particularly vivid ; partly, no doubt, because there is such a good writer as La Noue for authority, but also, one may suspect, because Sir Charles enjoys all this like a Dumas novel and communicates his enthusiasm to his readers. The very names of the battles, Dreux, Jarnac,
Moncoutour, Argues and Ivry, remind one of The Three Musketeers. And the wars are full of such episodes as William of Orange's perilous ride right across France, with only twenty gentlemen as escort, from Coligny's camp to the German frontier ; or the Catholic lords forming the front rank at Coutras, glittering with jewelrY—la cavaleriela plus convene de dinquant et d'orfivrerie qui ait esti rdunie en France; while the Protestants went into action singing the t ath Psalm :
" La void l'heureuse journee Que Dieu a faite a plein desk ; Pour nous soit joye demenee Et prenons en elle plaisir."
—Curious what a peculiar penchant Protestants have for
religious doggerel !
Sir Charles makes the point that the break between the conditions of mediaeval and sixteenth-century warfare comes very definitely with the French invasions of Italy beginning in 1494. Up to that time, the warfare of the Italian cities had become very much a check-board affair, with its elaborate
code of conventions and rules which often meant that a battle was " won" when hardly anybody had been killed. It was
all very artificial and harmless. But the incursion of the barbarians into Italy made war all too serious and real a thing. Mcn fought to win ; they wanted to kill as efficiently as they could. All Europe was dragged into the Italian wars. Sir Charles says : " Everything is changed when we shift on from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, and all the old local groups of war gradually grow into one single complex, in which Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire are all involved together."
Whether all this was responsible for the deterioration of Europe, and the defeat of so many high hopes of the Renais- sance, is too large a question to embark on here. But there is plenty of evidence from the most sensitive minds of the time which Sir Charles might have made use of. There is More; there is Erasmus, for example, with his mind so tortured by it all and his so sceptical a question : " Some princes deceive themselves that any war is, a just one and that they have a just cause for going to war. We will not attempt to discuss whether war is ever just ; but who does not think his own cause just ? " Such a question cuts the ground from under the feet of the fighting fools.
War is a function of human society. Sir. Charles brings out very clearly the technical developments of- the age, both in arms and in the characier of warfari; it Was a period of great
experiment in this as in so many other respects. " Just at this period the resources of7fortification were beginning to outrun those of the artillerist." Warfare became increasingly scientific as the century progressed, a matter of long sieges rather than cavalry actions. Much progress was made in the smaller fire-arms ; armies became larger as national units became bigger. It is evident that these and other develop- ments in warfare express the social circumstances of the time. Anyone can see that the Swiss mountains and their democracies would produce infantry, not cavalry ; and Sir Charles has an excellent passage on how differing social environments distin- guished the Catholic and the Protestant armies in the French Wars of Religion. One only wishes that this suggestive approach had been made explicit throughout the whole volume; it would have been so enlightening. But the author may reasonably object that that would have been to make it into
two. _
Anyhow, the book, as it is, is indispensable to the under- standing of the sixteenth century. It is the only work of its kind in English.:. I, will not say that the understanding of the sixteenth century is _indispensable to the twentieth ; but contemporaries would find its study very illuminating in our
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