light troops
Light troops is a phrase used throughout military history to distinguish unencumbered, agile soldiers by contrast with the ‘heavy’ or line infantry and cavalry. Modern usage first rose to real prominence during the great conflicts of the 18th century, notably the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War, the American independence war, and the French Revolutionary wars. The backbone of western armies during this period comprised heavy infantry who were trained to fight in close-order linear formations, normally three ranks deep. Musketry was delivered in salvoes, with more emphasis being placed on the rate of fire than on its accuracy, if only because smoothbore flintlocks were rather imprecise weapons with a maximum range of around 109 yards (100 metres). Orchestrating volleys and manoeuvring such ponderous, unwieldy formations called for a rigid system of command and control. Initiative on the part of individual soldiers was suppressed in favour of unquestioning compliance with instructions. Elaborate, ritualistic manual drills were devised, with, for instance, the loading and firing of a musket requiring as many as 30 distinct moves, each regulated by the beat of a drum. This training was underpinned by punitive disciplinary codes; troops were drilled, flogged, and caned into being more afraid of their officers than they were of the enemy. Indeed, Frederick ‘the Great’, who was to carry linear tactics to perfection, once summarized his notion of the ideal infantry regiment as a ‘moving battery’.
When troops of this kind were pitted against opponents who fought in accordance with the same Frederician principles, the system worked well enough. However, in the War of the Austrian Succession, the Habsburg empire mobilized large numbers of auxiliaries, both horse and foot, from Hungary, Croatia, and Romania who were normally utilized for border and local defence missions. These irregulars were unsuited to, and largely incapable of, fighting in the disciplined, geometric formations employed by regiments of the line. Nevertheless, they were regarded as having a valuable contribution to make to the so-called petite guerre (little war) —the mercurial conflict waged on the fringes of armies and which consisted of outpost and reconnaissance duties, ambushes, raids, and skirmishes.
This concept attracted ever more attention from military theorists as the century progressed. Experience in colonial conflicts, notably in America, where regular European soldiers found themselves fighting in enclosed, wooded, or mountainous terrain alongside auxiliary units often recruited from among trappers, hunters, and Native indian tribes, underscored the growing need for van, flank, and rearguards. In Europe, too, agricultural reforms and increasing prosperity gradually led to a topographical transformation which had major implications for battlefield tactics. The growth in urbanization, afforestation, and enclosure broke up the terrain, making much of it less than ideal for traditional close-order, linear formations. As a result, skirmishers acquired a role on the battlefield proper as well as in the peripheral guerre des postes (war of outposts).
With their gaudy attire, hefty packs, bulky weaponry and staid, inflexible tactics, soldiers of the line were ill-suited to the petite guerre. Light troops—the term denoting their tactical function still more than the mass of their equipment—who exploited cover and camouflage and combined the characteristics of the scout with those of the marksman, were what was called for. Indeed, the procedures and trappings of the hunt were adapted for military purposes. Dubbed ‘rangers’, chasseurs, or Jägers, odd companies and battalions of riflemen and other sharpshooters were raised. Deployed in open order, often across broken terrain and beyond the immediate supervision of their commanders, the manoeuvres of these soldiers were controlled by signals relayed by bugles and horns. Dressed in brown or dark green uniforms designed with ease of movement and other practical considerations in mind, they were primarily intended to act as free-moving, free-firing skirmishers, but the best were also capable of acting in rudimentary shoulder-to-shoulder formations when circumstances demanded. These versatile, all-purpose infantry were often combined into ‘legions’ in which they would serve alongside a few squadrons of light cavalry, usually dragoons who could fight on foot or horseback, and a handful of small, highly mobile artillery pieces.
In many senses, these units were the precursors to the combined-arms brigades and divisions into which Napoleon was to divide the entire French army in 1800 and from which modern armies continue to be structured. However, armed forces reflect the societies which spawn them and, in the 18th century, there was considerable resistance to the widespread introduction of light troops and many of the innovations associated with them. Within Europe's socially stratified armies, where officers were appointed more often than not on the basis of their social standing as aristocrats or affluent gentlemen, and where the rank and file were often recruited from the very dregs of society, common soldiers were often dismissed as mindless ruffians at the best of times. The disdain with which light troops were regarded was frequently still more intense. One Line officer serving in the American independence war dismissed them as ‘for the most part young and insolent puppies, whose worthlessness was apparently their recommendation to a service which placed them … in danger, and in the way of becoming food for powder, their most appropriate destination next to that of the gallows’. Their unglamorous, some would say scruffy, attire and unorthodox tactics inevitably encouraged the view among the British redcoats and their counterparts that light troops were a rabble who, lacking discipline and honour, were not to be compared to proper soldiers who, deployed in serried ranks, braved the enemy's fire like real men instead of shooting from under cover and running around ‘like lamp lighters’. Respectable society could only agree. But this sort of prejudice was not based merely on the opinion that the tactics of light troops were those of the coward. In a military system where unthinking obedience to one's betters formed the very basis of order, the ethos of the skirmisher with its emphasis on initiative and free movement seemed like dangerous heresy, one that could not only undermine the tactical efficacy of the armed forces but also have unsettling political ramifications for society as a whole.
The levée en masse of the French Revolutionary wars seemed to underscore this very point. The thousands of conscripts who were drafted into the French army lacked the training and discipline necessary to perform intricate, close-order manoeuvres with any finesse. However, as the embodiment of Rousseau's concept of free, natural men they had the appropriate psychological outlook to make marvellous skirmishers; all they required was some basic military instruction. So it was that, alongside the highly professional units of chasseurs that the French army had been developing for some time, there appeared a great mass of tirailleurs and voltigeurs who played an important part in the victories of the Republic over the armies of the ancien régime.
France's enemies gradually concluded that the only way to counter these soldiers was by developing more light forces of their own. Reformists such as the Duke of York and Lt Gen Sir John Moore in Britain, the Archduke Charles in Austria, and Gerhard von Scharnhorst and Karl von Tiedemann in Prussia all urged their respective countries to raise more light troops and train them accordingly. Instructing them revolved as much around psychological preparation as it did around tactical training. Since men from feudalistic societies tended to be unaccustomed to using their own initiative and there were political objections to giving them too much liberty, the success of these experiments varied considerably. Nevertheless, substantial numbers of light troops were incorporated into the armies of all the major powers in the course of the Napoleonic wars, many units, such as the British 95th Rifle Regiment, acquiring formidable reputations.
Light forces continued to have considerable utility for the rest of the 19th century and beyond. However, as the face of war changed under the impact of new technology, many of the old distinctions between heavy and light forces began to disappear. Infantry became versatile, general purpose troops and, once mechanized armoured warfare established itself as the most intense form of land combat, the terms ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ came to refer more to the mass of equipment employed by a given unit and less to its tactical function. While today the British army, for instance, still has several battalions which have the words ‘light infantry’ in their titles, they are essentially indistinguishable from other mechanized and armoured infantry units. Traces of the modus operandi of the light infantry of old still live on amidst special forces such as the SAS.
Bibliography
- Gates, D., The British Light Infantry Arm (London, 1987).
- Paret, P., Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform (Princeton, 1966)
— David Gates
