The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

13,

Take down your musket and carry it

with your rest

14,

Uncock your match

English civil wars (1642–49), and again, much later, in the first phases

of the French Revolution (1789–93). In more ordinary times, armies

became self-perpetuating training institutions, drilling raw recruits

until they became quite different from their former selves, that is,

until they became soldiers.^21

Various associated behavioral traits, transmitted from soldier to sol­

dier across the decades, grew up around the central experience of drill

to define a distinctive military style of life. Prostitutes, gambling, and

drunkenness all had a place in this way of life; so did pride, punctilio,

and prowess. European armies, in short, did not depart entirely from

older patterns and precedents. But they did relegate some of the

traditional aspects of military behavior to the margins, confining the

more disruptive of them to off-duty hours.

The new psychic character of European armies made sharp class

21. The psychic force of drill and new routines was such as to make a recruit’s origins
    and previous experience largely irrelevant to his behavior as a soldier. This deprives
    studies of class and local origins of enlisted men of more than antiquarian interest,
    despite the fact that military records sometimes lend themselves admirably to such
    analysis. French historians, perhaps influenced by Marxism, have been particularly ac­
    tive in this endeavor, without shedding any notable light on what the French army
    actually did either in war or in peace. The great monument of this genre is A. Corvisier,
    L'armée française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au ministère de Choiseul, 2 vols. (Paris, 1964).

(^138) Chapter Four