(^134) Chapter Four
The improved efficiency aroused by drill soon became apparent to
other military men of Europe. Prince Maurice’s reputation rested on
his recovery of dozens of fortified towns from the Spaniards through
sudden strikes and obdurate sieges, each conducted with a technical
precision and dispatch never attained before. Maurice’s methods of
training were not kept secret. In 1596 his cousin and close col
laborator, Johannes II of Nassau, commissioned an artist named Jacob
de Gheyn to produce drawings illustrating each of the postures that
arquebusiers, musketeers, and pikemen were required to take by the
new drill. These were published as a book in 1607. A full folio page
was devoted to each posture, together with the appropriate word of
command. An apprentice drillmaster—or common soldier—could
thus see with his own eyes just how to perform the drill.^13
Maurice organized a military academy for the training of officers in
1619 —another first for Europe. A graduate of Prince Maurice’s
academy subsequently took service with Gustav Adolf of Sweden
and brought the new Dutch drill to that army. From the Swedes the
new drill (variously modified of course) spread to all the other Euro
pean armies with any pretension to efficiency. Protestant states ac
cepted the innovation first; from them it spread to the French, and last
of all to the Spaniards, whose attachment to their own long-victorious
tradition was naturally very great. But after the Battle of Rocroi
(1643), when a French army defeated the Spanish tercios in open
(Harrisburg, Pa., 1944), pp. 30–31: ‘Have them march in cadence. There is the whole
secret, and it is the military step of the Romans.... Everyone has seen people dancing
all night. But take a man and make him dance lor a quarter of an hour without music,
and see if he can bear it....
“I shall be told, perhaps that many men have no ear for music. This is false; movement
to music is natural and automatic. I have often noticed while the drums were beating for
the colors, that all the soldiers marched in cadence without intention and without
realizing it. Nature and instinct did it for them.”
The military music of Christian Europe, incidentally, derived from Ottoman fife and
drum corps. These in turn were adaptations of steppe traditions of drumming which had
filtered into the Moslem world via dervish communities of young men. But Ottoman
troops did not drill incessantly as Christian troops started to do, nor did they march in
step, thereby muting the elemental resonance that moving in unison arouses.
- Jacob de Gheyn, Wapenhandelinghe van Roers, Musquetten ende Spiessen, Achter-
volgende de Ordre van Syn Excellentie Maurits, Prince van Orangie (The Hague, 1607). The
edition I saw was a facsimile (New York, 1971), with an informative commentary by
J. B. Kist appended. According to Kist, Maurice first held a review of his troops, with
field maneuvers, in 1592. At that time his battalions numbered 800 men each; later he
reduced the size of the battalion—the primary unit of maneuver—to 550 to make it
nimbler in the field and easier for a single voice to control. De Gheyn’s book was often
pirated subsequently; most significantly by Johann Jacob Wallhausen, Kriegskunst zu
Fuss (1614), who used the same copper plates as the original work, but wrote in
German.