(^172) Chapter Five
into being around the person of Gribeauval; that leaders of this group
had clearly in mind what could be achieved by taking advantage of
accurately bored gun barrels and saw their technical reforms as part of
a more general rationalization of army organization and training.
The traditions of European army life, emphasizing hierarchy,
obedience, and personal bravery, fitted awkwardly with Gribeauval’s
kind of cerebral calculation and experiment; and when technical ex
perts sought to apply the same methods to general questions about
how an army should be deployed and set out to raise the status of
gunners to something like equality with infantry and cavalry, resis
tance was naturally intense. Sharp fluctuations of policy with respect
to Gribeauval’s reforms reflected this strain between an assertive ra
tionalism and the cult of prowess (and other vested interests) within
the army and within the French government as a whole.
A weapon that could be used to kill soldiers impersonally and at a
distance of more than half a mile offended deep-seated notions of how
a fighting man ought to behave. Gunners attacking infantry at long
range were safe from direct retaliation: risk ceased to be symmetrical
in such a situation, and that seemed unjust. Skill of an obscure, math
ematical, and technological kind threatened to make old-fashioned
courage and muscular prowess useless. The definition of what it meant
to be a soldier was called into question by such a transformation, incip
ient and partial though it remained in the eighteenth century as com
pared to what was to come in the nineteenth and twentieth. The
introduction of small arms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
had already diminished the role of direct hand-to-hand combat and
muscular encounter in battle; only the cavalry, charging home with
cold steel, preserved, under eighteenth-century conditions, the
primitive reality of combat. This reinforced the prestige cavalry in
herited in European armies from the days of knighthood. Nobles and
conservatively minded soldiers in general clung energetically to the
old-fashioned, muscular definition of battle. Artillerymen with their
cold-blooded mathematics seemed subversive of all that made a sol
dier’s life heroic, admirable, worthy.
This sort of heartfelt emotion seldom found clear articulation. It
tapped irrational levels of human personality, and those who felt
keenly the wrongness of long-range artillery were not usually gifted in
the use of words. But newfangled technicians and their angriest oppo
nents could agree on one thing: sale of commissions to the highest
bidder allowed the wrong kind of men to become officers. To exclude
unqualified parvenus and keep commissions in military families, the
brent
(Brent)
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