220 Chapter Six
of the war years was everywhere the order of the day, and no one
supposed that industrial technology could be harnessed to the task of
producing radically new sorts of weapons capable of upsetting the
traditional routines and patterns of military and naval life. No one
wanted such a revolutionary break either, and when it came, after
1840, nearly all professional officers were opponents of change, not its
proponents.
To sum up: despite the new power that revolutionary idealism and
the administrative implementation of liberty and equality had con
ferred upon the French between 1792 and 1815, the rulers and mili
tary men of Europe clearly and emphatically preferred the security of
old routines. Consequently, the traditions and patterns of Old Regime
armies and navies survived the storm of the revolutionary years
essentially intact. Weaponry changed little. Promising innovations met
short shrift from conservatively minded commanders. Thus Napoleon
disbanded the balloon observation corps that had been introduced
into the French army in 1793, and Wellington flatly refused to employ
the new “Congreve” rockets which, despite difficulty in controlling
their flight accurately, had proved quite effective in attacking large
targets such as towns and forts.^65
“Tried and true,” seemed a far safer policy to the rulers of Europe
and their military advisers after 1815. Some residues of the wars
remained: divisional and corps organization, still a novelty in the
1790s, had become normal by 1815. Increased reliance on maps and
on staff work was also pretty much taken for granted, since the great
escalation in the size of armies that had taken place between 1792 and
1815 was by no means entirely reversed in the demobilization that
- These weapons were invented by an Englishman, William Congreve (1772—
1828), in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He was stimulated by reports of
how the Indian prince, Tipoo Sahib, had used rockets against British soldiers in 1792
and 1799– His rockets attained a range about twice that of contemporary field artillery;
they were used with considerable effect against Boulogne in 1806 (after a failure the
year before), and in subsequent attacks against Copenhagen (1807), Danzig (1813) and
at the battle of Leipzig (1813). Congreve rockets also played a conspicuous part in the
War of 1812, a fact commemorated in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They may indeed
have allowed the British to reach and burn the new American capital of Washington.
Rocket corps were set up in most European armies after 1813; but after the 1840s
spectacular new developments in artillery made rockets seem too inaccurate to be worth
while. They disappeared from war towards the end of the nineteenth century, to be
revived in a big way only in World War II. Cf. Willy Ley, Rockets, Missiles, and Men in
Space (New York, 1968), pp. 61–75; Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway III,
Rocketry and Space Travel, 3d ed. (New York, 1975), pp. 30–34. On Wellington’s rejec
tion of Congreve’s rockets, see Glover, Peninsular Preparation, pp. 68–73.
